Gone Home
by Obsidian Productions
Summary: 1:15 AM. July 7th, 1995. Kaitlin Greenbriar has just arrived at her family's new home. Back after a year of studying abroad, she finds the large mansion, isolated in the woods during a rainstorm, to be completely empty. As she hunts through the house for clues as to the whereabouts of her missing family, she discovers more than she bargained for.
1. Prologue: Going Home

" _...will be coming in for a landing very shortly. Please make sure your seat trays are up and your seats backs are in their upright position and locked. Thank you."_

The words dragged me slowly out of the tentative sleep I'd been drifting through for the past...how long was this flight supposed to be? I opened my eyes and took a deep breath, slowly stretching. My neck hurt now from the awkward position I'd slipped into while asleep and I reached up, massaging it gently as I looked around. The cabin still looked sedate and almost dreamy. There weren't too many people around.

That still seemed kind of surreal to me, but I guess not all flights are jam-packed. Maybe there just weren't that many people flying back from Amsterdam to Portland, Oregon in the middle of the night. Rubbing the remains of sleep from my eyes, I sat up a little more fully and looked out the window. There were still just clouds out there, clouds and darkness, but the plane was headed down. It wouldn't be long before it was on the ground.

I'd been on more planes than I wanted to think about over the past year.

Thankfully, this was the last one! At least for awhile. Hopefully.

Flying still made me nervous. It just seemed like it was all too easy for something to go wrong in something as intricate and complex as a plane...but now I was just scaring myself. It was almost over. Then I could go home.

Home…

I had never even been home, at least not to this one. Not yet.

I settled in and waited.

* * *

It had been a long, strange year in Europe.

Mostly fun, sometimes annoying, sometimes frightening, but all in all a good time. Originally, I wasn't sure if I wanted to do it, but...hey, how many college sophomores get a chance to spend a year studying abroad in freaking Europe?! My dorm mate said it best when I was still struggling with the decision…

 _You'd be a moron not to do this!_

She'd been right, of course.

It had been quite the change from Portland, where I'd spent my first year of college. Maybe most importantly of all, in a way that I was only recently beginning to even grasp in the slightest, it was like...saying goodbye to my childhood. Sitting there on a plane as it landed in Portland, I didn't feel like an adult, not at all.

But I didn't feel like a kid anymore, either. Maybe not even a teenager. Ha, at twenty one, I'm sure I know what a lot of adults would have to say about that. And maybe I'm wrong. But probably what got me thinking on the whole subject was the fact that I never even got to say goodbye to our old house, because while I was away, in a very strange turn of events, my parents had inherited a mansion apparently out in the middle of nowhere.

When they'd first told me in a letter almost a year ago, right after I'd left, I didn't even know what to think. I thought it was a joke. But, no, it wasn't. Apparently, we had a great uncle Oscar, and he had died, and he had given us his house. His mansion, I guess. It was weird, I never thought I'd live in a mansion. But was it a mansion...or was that just my mom and dad putting on airs and _calling_ it a mansion? They'd sent pictures, and it seemed big but…

Well, I guess I'd find out before too long.

The plane came to a stop and the pilot wished us all farewell and thanked us for flying Delta Airlines. I was just thankful that we'd made it there in one piece. I stood up, stretched, and felt my neck pop. That was a relief, at least. Reaching up, I grabbed my duffel-bag from the overhead compartment and then got into the single file line of the two dozen or so passengers that were getting off. It reminded me uncomfortably of elementary school.

* * *

As I stumbled into the bright lights of the terminal, I was half-expecting to see my parents, and maybe even Sam, waiting for me. Before leaving Amsterdam, I'd made a call to the new number. Of course no one answered, so I'd left a message pleading with my mom not to come get me. The late flight was the cheapest option, so I took it. My mom and dad hadn't exactly told me everything, but I got the feeling from them, (and from Sam's letters too), that money wasn't very easy to come by nowadays for them.

So of course that made me feel guilty for spending an entire year in Europe at their expense. But at the time, they'd said it wasn't a problem.

But, standing there in the wake of the deplaning passengers, I saw no one waiting for me in the vast, lonely terminal. Well, that was good at least. Sighing, feeling sluggish and dull, like my brain was wrapped in cotton or wool, I trudged along with my heavy duffel-bag, trying to get to the baggage claim without any trouble.

I still had a ways to go before actually getting home.

While we'd originally lived in Portland, now my parents lived all the way out in a small city called Boon County, which was about an hour's drive or so. At least I wouldn't have to be driving. Plus, I had enough money left in my pocket to catch a shuttle out to the city and a taxi from there once I was actually in Boon County. If my bag would ever show back up. I watched the bag thing make its slow, trundling trek.

A black suitcase went by.

A red suitcase.

Two blue duffel-bags.

I wondered what was in those or who they belonged to. I was the only one here right now...there it is! My own bag was coming slowly into view. I snagged it as it came back, then paused to check the paper attached to it.

 _Kaitlin Greenbriar  
Portland, Oregon, United States  
Flight #270  
June 6, 1995_

Yep, it was mine all right. Although I can't imagine there being a duplicate of it floating around. The bag, which all my friends I'd made in Europe declared hideous, was a tan-greenish color with a repeating pattern of what seemed to be broken televisions and the checkerboard pattern of taxi cabs...I think. I could never actually figure out what it was supposed to be, but I found it in a gift shop in Frankfurter and I just had to have it.

Grabbing the bag and hefting my duffel, I began to head outside. But as I made for the front exit, a row of silver payphones, gleaming in the bright white light of the terminal, caught me eye. Well, why not? I could spare a quarter and I know mom would be annoyed at being woken up, but she'd be more annoyed if I _didn't_ wake her up to let her know I was safely back in the States. Of course she and dad might not be there.

They weren't very clear in their last letter, (neither was Sam,) but they said they might be going on some kind of...nature retreat or vacation or something. It had been vague and of course it was the letter I got right before I was to come home, so there was no time to write back and _of course_ the two times I actually did call to chat and mom actually picked up, neither of us remembered to bring it up. But Sam should at least be there.

Where else would she be at this hour?

Glancing at the clock, I saw it was just past midnight, which officially made it June 7th...not that that really mattered.

I set my stuff down by the phones, fished a quarter out of my pocket, fed it into the machine and punched in the number I'd made myself memorize. It rang...and rang...and rang...after about ten rings, the answering machine finally clicked on.

Of course. Sam was probably asleep. She could sleep through an earthquake.

"Sam...Saaaaam...hello?..." I sighed. "Sam!"

No answer. She wasn't waking up. Great. Whatever. I hung up the phone, grabbed my bags and headed for the exit.

* * *

The shuttle made good time. Either that or it wasn't really an hours' ride out there. Either way, when I stepped off the shuttle and into the parking lot where a couple of taxis idled, it was just shy of being one in the morning.

I walked over to the nearest taxi and got in. The driver, a fiftyish man with a scruff of dark stubble, a floppy hat, and a toothpick sticking out of his mouth, glanced back from the magazine he'd been reading. "Where to, young lady?" he asked.

"One Arbor Hill," I replied, settling in.

"Pretty far out there," he replied, keying the ignition.

"Yep," I agreed.

As we took off, the storm clouds I'd noticed via brief flashes of lightning finally let loose with their promise of rain.

I didn't know if it was a good omen or a bad one.

* * *

I thought I'd be ready to sleep all night at this point, but as my watch ticked closer to one fifteen in the morning and the taxi bumped along Arbor Hill, I was wired. Maybe it was the elation of surviving not only another plane trip, but a boring drive on a shuttle and a taxi through a whole lot of darkness and rain. Or maybe I was just glad to be back home in the States. Europe was fun in a lot of different ways, but I missed home.

Probably what it was was that I was going to get to see this mansion for the first time in the flesh, with my own eyes, and well…

I love exploring!

We had only ever moved twice before this and each time I loved exploring every possible nook and cranny of the new places we lived. I thought it was something that would fade as I got older, a childish obsession, but I'd be lying if I said I wasn't looking forward to poking around this new place. Although, I have to admit, the pictures I'd seen of it so far made it look kind of creepy. Plus, it was raining and the middle of the night.

"Here we are," the taxi driver said as he pulled into the driveway. "You want some help with the bags?" he offered.

"No thanks," I replied.

"That'll be eight bucks even."

I fished out a five and three ones, then passed them to him, thanked him one more time and left the taxi, bags in hand.

I looked up at my parent's new home.

Although the dimensions were lost to me as the glow of the taxi's headlights faded, I got a sense of scale, standing there in the driveway, staring at it.

It was big.

Also, there were no cars in the driveway. Well...they were probably in the garage. I could see a single garage door, closed against the elements. To the left of the driveway and the garage, through a haze of rainy darkness thick with trees, (there were a lot of trees around), I could see lights on and a front door.

Holding my bags, I set off.

It was time to see this mansion for myself.


	2. Chapter 01: Sam's Note

So this was home.

Letting myself in through the front door of the house led into a totally enclosed porch. I had to say, it was fancy, in a '50s or '60s kind of way. I had seen many different kinds of porches and this seemed like the real deal. It wasn't an 'enclosed' porch, nor was it a screened-in porch. It was an actual room that felt like it was supposed to be part of the house. I was reluctant to call it a porch, it was more like an entryway. Wasn't there a word for this kind of room, an old-timey word? Parlor? I looked around this room and set down my bags.

Most of the front wall, (behind me), was taken up by windows that were streaked with rain, not showing much besides trees and some branches pressing up against the glass in some areas. The floors looked old but well-maintained, they were beautiful hardwood. Although, I decided as I stared at the walls, maybe this did feel like a porch, if only because the walls were made of siding, the only hint that this room had been added on after the fact.

There was stuff in the porch that didn't look like anything we owned: some very low to the floor wooden sling-back chairs, the kind that made you sit _way_ back if you sat down in them. They were ugly and, I realized, probably belonged to my mysterious great uncle Oscar. As I continued looking around, my eyes suddenly latched on to something that was very out of place. Directly ahead of me were a pair of doors and there was a note stuck to one of them.

Okay, maybe I'd get some answers after all.

I crossed the room and began reading the note, immediately recognizing Sam's handwriting. Though it was kind of messy, as if she'd written it in a hurry.

 _Katie,_

 _I'm sorry I can't be there to  
see you, but it is impossible.  
Please, please don't go digging  
around trying to find out  
where I am. I don't want  
Mom and Dad __anyone to know.  
We'll see each other again  
some day. Don't be worried.  
I love you.  
-Sam_

Oh crap...what the hell did that mean? Feeling worry begin to seriously gnaw at me, I grabbed the doorknob and tried to turn it, but it wouldn't budge. Locked. Sighing, I tried the next one. Same deal. Locked down tight. I resisted the urge to curse as I tried to look in through the stained glass windows built into each door, but they were too opaque to see literally anything, so I gave up the effort. I had to get inside.

If something had happened to Sam…

I turned around, looking around the room again. Of course I didn't have a key...so where would I find one? They _had_ to leave a key for me, right? I didn't relish the idea of wandering around the exterior of the house in the rainy darkness, not even a flashlight to my name, trying to find an unlocked window or another open door.

Then I spied a squat cabinet that I _did_ recognize from our old living room. It used to sit right next to the front door and mom or dad would always toss their keys and the mail onto it after they got in. Now, there was a little lamp and a potted plant that looked new atop it. There were two lights on already, built in lights meant to look like old lanterns on either side of the door, but it wasn't enough to make me comfortable.

Plus, one of them was flickering periodically.

I marched over to the cabinet, flicked on the lamp and crouched, pulling open the two doors and peering inside.

I couldn't help but smile as I saw what was within. Next to a tangle of Christmas lights atop some very cheesy, generic ornaments mom insisted on hanging around the house every year was none other than the Christmas Duck.

Seeing the old thing made me feel warm inside in a way I hadn't for what seemed like a long time now. It was a bit battered, a bit old. Hey, it had been in the family for ten years now. It was a simple, roughly life-size figurine of a duck with a green wreath with a red bow around its neck. I could still remember its inception into the family.

It was December, all the way back in '85. Mom and dad were going shopping for Christmas dinner, which was looming on the horizon, only about three days away. Family was coming into town since Christmas was going to be at the Greenbriar's that year and my parents had left the shopping kind of late. While we were making our way through Bert's Market, an ugly converted warehouse with a lot of water damage and poor lighting, shouldering our way through the crowd, my mother had all at once noticed that Sam was holding a toy duck.

"Sam..." she'd said, and we all stopped in the frozen foods aisle, looking for frozen peas, "where did you get that?"

"I found it," Sam replied simply. She was seven then, and it was enough of an explanation for her, apparently.

"We'll have to put it back," my dad said.

"No!" Sam exclaimed. "It's the Christmas Duck! It wants to come home with me!"

I'd expected frustration from one or both of my parents. Sam could be...difficult, even then. At that point in time, I was eleven, and I felt a little superior, because I was the 'mature' one. Instead, a bemused smile touched my mom's lips.

"The Christmas Duck?" she asked.

"Yes! He wants to come home with us!" Sam repeated firmly.

"Here, let me see him, honey."

Sam reluctantly passed the Christmas Duck up to mom, who looked it over, eventually finding a pricetag on the bottom. "It's just six bucks, Terry," she said. "Why don't we grab it for her?"

"All right, fine," my dad replied.

And so it was: the Christmas Duck was born.

Reaching in, I picked him up and, sure enough, there was a key underneath. I retrieved it. Before putting him back, I flipped him over. Yep, the pricetag was _still_ there. _$5.99_ in black text against a faded, still faintly shiny gold background. For a moment, I was struck by how crazy that was. For ten years we had all been growing and living and changing and doing everything in our lives...but this sticker was still on this duck…

The moment passed and, with a mixture of worry and anticipation, I moved back over to the front door and slid the key in the lock.

Bingo.

Turning it let me right in and as I stepped in through the front door, I realized that the porch was indeed a porch...because _this_ was the entryway to the house. It was huge! The room spread out before me, all of it done up in dark wood. I saw open areas that looked like they led off to other parts of the house to the left and right, as well as a door to my immediate left and one to my immediate right. But directly ahead of me, dominating my view, cast in a flickering light, was a massive wooden stairway, leading up to the second story of the mansion.

Okay, this place was definitely big!

For a moment, I felt totally dwarfed, not just by the size of the place, but by wondering just how the heck I was going to find out what happened to Sam. Where would I start looking? I glanced at my watch. It was creeping up on one thirty in the morning now. There was obviously no way I was going to sleep any time soon, I _had_ to find out what had happened to my little sister. For a moment, I just stood there, thinking.

The note had begged me not to go looking...which implied that there was something, somewhere in this house that would give me an answer. Probably. And Sam didn't want me to find it. I fully intended to disobey that particular request. There was no way I was just going to let this slide! And besides, if I tried to pull a disappearing act like this, Sam would shake apart Heaven and Earth looking for me, I just knew it.

So where to begin?

I immediately thought that there'd be something in her room, some clue, but...well, wasn't that too obvious? And why would Sam want to hide it anyway? Then I remember the other part of the note. She'd scratched out mom and dad...if they went looking, her room would be the first place. Where was somewhere less obvious?

Ugh, if only I knew this house better…

Then it hit me. Something Sam had begged and begged our parents for throughout her life, since she was young, was a dark room to develop photos in. Sam _loved_ taking pictures and it was her dream. She'd written to me tons of times about the fact that now that she lived here, mom and dad had finally caved and given her one…

In the attic.

Okay, well, that was a start. I moved across the room, grateful that the overhead light had stopped flickering at least. I glanced up as I passed under that light, which had been hidden from view because it was in a recessed area of the ceiling, and found myself staring at an honest-to-goodness chandelier. Okay, it didn't have a million pieces of hanging glass or crystal like the ones in rich people's homes or in movies, but it was definitely a chandelier and kind of impressive. I didn't linger for long though, the desire for knowledge pushed me on.

I made my way up the stairs, went across the small landing and through the dark doorway at the back. I was in a dark hallway and, after a minute of hunting, I found the light switch. Except it wasn't a switch, but a button. I pushed it and a bunch of lamps that hung from the wall, done up in a kind of flower design, snapped to life.

The hallway extended away from me to the right, and to the left was a little niche area with a window and an endtable. I almost turned away from it but something caught my eye on the table. The in-the-moment curiosity ended up beating out the larger curiosity, at least for now, and I stepped over to the endtable.

It was my mom's personal planner.

For a moment, I resisted the urge to look inside. It was private...but she obviously wasn't here. I was alone in this house and, again, curiosity won. I opened it to the most recent page with writing in it. Each page had four blank rectangles on it, each one apparently meant to be a week. Not a very good planner, not much detail.

All of the weeks had

 _Monday: Couples Bowling  
Wednesday: Cooking Class  
Friday: Ballroom Dancing_

written in them. Only, starting at the first week and going down, every example of Couple's Bowling was hastily scratched out. Then, starting on the second week, Ballroom Dancing was scratched out, too. At the very bottom was: _Cook the big meal for Katy and Sam!_ That made me smile but, as I replaced the planner on the table, the smile faded.

Apparently mom had talked dad into not one, but two things that got him out of the house. For as long as I could remember, dad was a recluse. He didn't leave if he could help it. He was a writer, and I guess a lot of writers were just like that. But obviously it hadn't panned out. I knew that was something they fought about. Mom wanted to go out a lot, dad didn't. It had kind of died off during my last few years of high school.

It kind of felt like mom had just given up.

There was something kind of...I don't know, worrying maybe, about this planner. Like, she had actually convinced him to go, and it had fallen through both times. Maybe I was projecting, but I could see mom angrily scratching out all the instances of Ballroom Dancing and Couples Bowling with an intense frown on her face and maybe tears in her eyes following some fight over it. It wasn't impossible. Man, it wasn't even unlikely.

Finally, my larger curiosity and concern about Sam reasserted itself and I turned away from the endtable and its planner. As I started walking down the hall, I could immediately tell that the door at its end led to Sam's room. There was a bright yellow paper stuck to the front of it with a big black radioactive symbol scrawled across it. It bore a warning: **CAUTION RADIATION AREA KEEP OUT**.

Of course, classic Sam.

I was briefly tempted to check out her room, but I wanted to see that attic first. It just felt right. She'd called it her hideaway more than once in her letters. I turned left and found another long stretch of hall with two clearly visible doors and _another_ hallway leading off to the right, about halfway down. Holy crap! It was hard to get over just how big this place was. I was used to cramped apartments and moderately sized houses.

I moved down the corridor, glancing briefly down the side hall and seeing another two doors, though one of them looked like it was just a secondary entrance to Sam's room, then kept going. As I approached the end of this second hall, my eyes caught on another piece of paper. Another note? I had to pass through an area of uncomfortable dimness to get there, apparently there just weren't enough lights to go around, and when I reached the paper, tucked halfway underneath a door at its end, I crouched, retrieved it, and began to read it.

 _Katie-_

 _Mom and Dad were going to  
make up the guestroom for  
you to stay in over the  
summer, but you came  
home on such short notice  
that they weren't around  
to do it.  
You can use my room if you  
want. I won't be needing  
it anyways.  
-Sam_

I didn't think I'd come home on short notice...but from the way things had turned out, and the few conversations we'd had leading up to the event, I _do_ think that my family was very distracted and they weren't keeping track of my travel plans too well. It was easy to resist the urge to check out the guest bedroom, especially when I glanced up from reading the paper and saw that the next (and final) hallway came to an end not too far away.

And it was bathed in red light.

Setting the paper back down on the floor, I passed another partially open door and came to the end of the hall, looking up. There was the attic trapdoor in the ceiling, and there were glowing red Christmas lights strung up all around it. Glancing down, I saw a piece of white construction paper taped the to wall directly ahead of me.

 _SAM'S DARKROOM  
DO NOT ENTER  
IF RED LIGHTS  
ARE ON!_

I grinned. Trying every little trick to keep me out...but those red lights wouldn't stop me! It wasn't like she was up there developing photos...or what if she was? I suddenly wondered if Sam was playing a joke on me. It was totally possible. Oh well...either way, I needed to know. Reaching up, I grabbed the handle and pulled.

The trapdoor jerked in my hand, but stayed firmly shut.

I spied a keyhole.

It was locked...great. Now what?


	3. Chapter 02: One More Adventure

Okay, obviously there had to be a key around here somewhere.

But where?

Then a thought sparked in my head: Sam's room. Although Sam did like to squirrel things away, she might have left the key in her room. I turned away from the trapdoor and the red Christmas lights and retraced my steps back to Sam's room. As I approached, I paid more attention to the cork-board I'd only glanced at in passing previously. It was hung on the wall right next to her door and there were a few memos attached to it.

 _Daniel called_ was overlapped by _Daniel called again. He wants his Nintendo Games back._ It was written in dad's clear, slightly stylish handwriting. Oh, Daniel...I hadn't thought about him in a long time. Below these two sticky notes, I saw a rectangular piece of white paper pinned with a thumbtack that read:

 _Sam:  
Stop leaving every damn light in the house on!  
You're as bad as your sister!_

That was mom. She had the flat, blocky handwriting.

But most interesting of all was a big piece of folded paper torn out of a spiral notebook, clearly written by my sister.

 _TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN:_

 _I, Samantha Greenbriar, am SEVENTEEN years  
old, and am therefore an independent, fully  
functional human being.  
The fact that you still forbid me from going  
into the city on my own is, frankly, absurd.  
Compare with Katie, who is only three (3)  
years older than me and yet you allowed  
her to go ALL AWAY ACROSS AN OCEAN  
TO ANOTHER CONTINENET on her own.  
I just want to spend an evening in a normal  
totally safe_ _city ON MY OWN like a HUMAN  
BEING and since you may also remember that  
I have my own car now, you CAN'T  
REALLY STOP ME._

 _Warmest regards,  
your daughter. Samantha_

I felt a twinge of guilt reading it. Sam was right. I had always had more free reign than she ever did in my parent's eyes. I don't really know why...or did I? I kind of felt like maybe I _did_ know, or I had once known, and I had forgot it. It was a really weird feeling. I had always thought I was more mature, and maybe I was. Although we both had hissy fits and tantrums growing up, Sam definitely had a lot more, and although I had grown out of them, (you know, for the most part...), it was clear from this note that Sam still had a bit of a temper.

But was she wrong to have that temper?

Mom and dad had always been harder on her and I never really could figure out why.

Well, it was time to check out my little sister's new room. I turned and reached out, but the second my hand touched the door knob, a sharp, booming crack of thunder exploded somewhere overhead and rattled the whole house, it also dimmed the lights momentarily. I let out a small yell of surprise, feeling my heart leap into my throat.

I let go of the door and looked around, to the left and behind me, down the long hallways made of old wood.

Suddenly, it occurred to me how creepy this place was. And I was totally alone here...all at once, I wanted to be back downstairs, where it was brighter and more open. I realized that I'd left my bags in the entryway...maybe I should bring them up to the guest bedroom. Yeah, that sounded like a great idea. I turned fully around and quickly made my way back the way I'd come from. As I went back down the stairs, I didn't like the way the left side of the room was bathed in shadows. I noticed a lamp sitting on a dresser right next to the door I'd come in through. I hurried over to it and turned it on with a click. Bright light filled out the rest of the entryway.

As I looked at the dresser, (why was there this squat dresser in the entryway?), I saw one of the drawers was partially open. My curiosity came back at once as I saw a note in there. I reached down in and fished it out. It was a hastily drawn map and some directions. I realized it must be directions to mom's job.

At the bottom it read: _Travel Time: 1 hr 10 minutes?!_

Oh, poor mom. I had always envied her her job, she worked as a conservationist in a national park, she was a director of...something, actually. I could never remember the specifics of her job, but I knew that she loved it, she loved the outdoors and she'd been at it for ten years. I put the paper back and started to head for my bags again, but then paused as I saw something peeking out from behind the dresser.

I reached down and grabbed it.

A picture of a dog with some silly sunglasses on it stared up at me. It had a yellow trim with badly done polka-dots and, on the top, it read: _Have a DOGGONE cool_ _ **17**_ _ **th**_ _birthday!_ I opened the card and saw: _Happy Birthday, Sam! -Uncle Harvey_

It had probably come with fifty bucks, or maybe even more. I know uncle Harvey was always good for some cash. He'd made it big as a construction worker, now a foreman with his own company, and he was always sending us lots of cash. As much as I loved it, I always felt a twitch of guilt, because obviously mom and dad were always there when we opened these cards and they saw the money and they...didn't make a lot of money. Not like him.

Sometimes it kind of felt like uncle Harvey was rubbing it in my dad's face.

I sighed and put the card away in one of the drawers, then decided to investigate further and searched through all three drawers in the dresser, but there was nothing else that held any appeal, so I turned away.

That's when I saw, directly across from me to the right, a door that was slightly ajar. Inside of it: a toilet. Oh my God, I needed to pee so bad! It hit me all at once and as I crossed the room, hurrying to the bathroom, I tried to think of the last time I actually went. Getting inside, I flipped on the light, pushed the door closed and set to work relieving myself. The last time I'd gone was before I got on my connecting flight in New York, which was a six hour flight! After I flushed, I washed my hands and looked around.

The bathroom looked...weird. Again, it was all this old-timey stuff, it had like a sixties, or maybe even fifties feel to it. Sam would probably call it Mid-Century Chic. As I dried my hands, I was suddenly curious about the bathroom, wondering if it held any secrets. Ha, curious was probably going to be the word of the night. I couldn't help it! This new house was so big and mysterious and there was probably so much hidden here.

My previous sudden fear seemed kind of silly now as I looked through the bathroom. There was really just a big wooden container type thing next to the toilet with rolling doors on it to check out, so I did. There was a lot of regular stuff in there: towels, rolls of toiletpaper, hand soap, cleansing powder, band-aids...and a magazine.

Author Magazine.

Definitely dad's. It offered things like: _50 CONTESTS with up to $21,000 in prizes_ and _CRITIQUES The Art of Feedback_ and _GET PUBLISHED THE Secret_. I always thought it was kind of crap, well, _all_ magazines were, at least to a certain extent. Although there was _one_ magazine in particular that I still loved and I'd bet Sam did too. Fresh. I loved the Fresh magazine. But staring at dad's magazine, I remembered the occasional times when he would take us out to celebrate because he'd sold a short story to a magazine.

It had been a long time since that had happened.

I put the magazine back. Okay, _now_ I was going to get my bags and put them where they belonged. Stepping out of the bathroom, though, something caught my eye again. It was like the house was conspiring to keep me busy.

This time, it was a manila folder sitting on a little endtable to my immediate right, just beside the bathroom's doorway. I saw a few papers poking out of it. I moved around to get a better look at it and flipped it open.

It was an invoice, typed up in bland, unfeeling black lettering against badly xeroxed white paper. Reading over it, I realized it was for the moving company my parents had hired: Wellsprings Movers, Inc. Looking at the number at the bottom right corner of the page made my stomach go cold. **$2750**. Almost three grand!?

 _Almost three thousand dollars?!_

Oh man, if we were having money problems before...jeez. This looked bad...and where the hell were mom and dad? And Sam? As I set the paper back down, I realized there was another paper, one that looked very different. It was another piece of lined paper with a jagged left edge: torn out of a spiral notebook.

I immediately recognized Sam's handwriting.

 _Aug. 20, 1994  
_ " _At the New House"_

 _Dear Katie,  
So much has changed, even just since you've been  
gone. We moved into this house...I'm at a new school…  
and my big sister being GONE for a year doesn't make it  
any easier…  
It doesn't feel real. But I'm not going to let it phase me.  
I used to tell you everything, and if I can't do it in  
person because you're off gallivanting around who  
knows where, I'll tell you in this journal. Just like I was  
talking to you._

I felt a smile touch my lips. This had Sam written all over it. From the way she titled her journal entries to the writing style, it was all her. She'd hidden it here...why? For me to find? That thought sparked another: there might be these journal pages all over the house. Sam knew how much I loved to explore, to go hunting for things, to have an adventure. If the first note she'd left was true, if she was really gone, if she'd really left on the very night she knew I was coming home then...well, maybe she'd left them all over the house for me to find.

Maybe she wanted to give me one more adventure.


	4. Chapter 03: The Search Begins

So where to begin?

All at once I felt positively alive, electro-charged even! So many possibilities! Directly across the room from me was another door, this one closed. Well, why not? It seemed like as good a place to start this adventure as any. What else did I have going on? Besides figuring out what the hell happened to Sam and my parents, of course, but it made sense to look for clues, which was just what I was doing anyway.

I crossed the room and opened the door. It led to a closet. I reached up and yanked on the pull-string I saw hanging in front of my face. There were some boxes, but they didn't really look interesting, some jackets...I saw what must be Sam's new school jacket. Goodfellow High School. The mascot was an owl...cool! It was adorable. I'd always loved owls. I also saw mom's jacket with her job badge clipped to it.

Janice Greenbriar – Senior Conservationist.

Go mom! I'd always loved that she loved what she did and was successful at it.

Unfortunately, the closet seemed to be a bust, not a really good starting place. All I found was a board game up high. Over the Alps: a novel traveling game. Me and Sam used to love it and had always begged mom and dad to play with us, but there had been a good year-long stretch, maybe even longer, where mom banned it because me and Sam got into a _really_ bad fight one game where Sam threw a half-empty can of soda at me.

It had given me a bloody nose.

Oh man, she had been in _so_ much trouble, grounded for two weeks! And _I_ was the one who ended up feeling bad. Sure, it had hurt, but not _that_ much. Although I guess it was good for her, it let her know she could _not_ do something like that again, that it wasn't acceptable behavior. She even felt terrible after doing it, I could tell that it was just an in-the-moment bit of fury. Even I'd had some of those and only my self control had kept me from slapping a couple of idiots when I got my first job at a grocery store when I was sixteen.

I had forgiven her, of course. Nothing had ever really come between us. Sure, we had sibling rivalry, but we usually didn't stay mad at each other for longer than a day or two. Putting the game back up in its spot, I considered my next move. As I looked along the wall to my left, which continued for a couple feet before dipping in, out of sight, into an open area, I was suddenly reminded of probably the only video game I'd ever seriously played.

Doom.

 _Everybody_ was talking about it all last year and I'd ended up trying it at a friend's house. I normally didn't play anything beyond solitaire or Minesweeper, but oh man...Doom was _addictive_. I'd played it a ton...until my mom figured out what I was doing and forbid me from playing it. It sucked but I got over it, eventually.

But a big part of that game had been searching the environment. When you were looking for something, you scanned the room, then moved along the walls. I wasn't looking for hidden panels or secret chambers now, but it was a sound theory. I moved along the wall and into the open area where it was very dark, but there was just enough light to see a floor lamp across the room. I crossed it and quickly turned it on, uncomfortable in the darkness.

Flipping it on revealed another door, a bookshelf, and a fancy table with doors on it. I poked through the fancy table and almost skipped over a handwritten letter. It was packed with writing and I started reading, curious since I didn't recognize the handwriting.

 _Dear Jan,_

 _It's so good to hear from you again! All  
this new house business sounds like quite the  
adventure! Remember the little dorm room we  
shared, freshman year? When we were miserable,  
fantasizing about our dream homes? I always said  
I wanted a mansion, you said you just wanted a  
house in the woods...look who got both! Somebody  
up there likes you! I could use some of that  
magic. Send me some lotto numbers, I'll play them!  
Seriously!_

 _But I shouldn't be complaining about this  
good old split-level we've had since Bob got  
transferred to Winnipeg. We just got new  
vinyl siding. Jealous yet? Let me know if you  
ever want to trade places…  
_

 _So how are the girls doing? Has Katie left  
on her big European adventure yet? Speaking  
of jealous…_

 _Write back soon!_

 _I miss you, roomie!  
Carol_

So it was a letter from my mom's old friend Carol. I liked her. She was always nice, always laughing and smiling. I replaced the letter and moved on to the bookshelf. I found a bible, (no use there), and a bunch of generic books. I also found my long jump trophy from junior year and another one from sophomore year for the 100-meter dash. I'd managed to place first in both of them. The weirdest thing though, in between them, there was a skull done up in a Mexican luchador mask, the kind Mexican wrestlers wore, but I thought it might be a Day of the Dead kind of thing...that was definitely new. Who had bought this?

Maybe Sam, but it seemed weird that mom or dad would put up with it being on display. Maybe dad had bought it. Well, _probably_ dad had bought it, I realized now that I thought about it. Dad was kinda...out there. He liked to buy weird things every now and then. Well, that was all there was to see there.

I turned to the door and tried it. Locked. Of course. I tried the house key in it but there was no luck, it was closed to me.

Sighing, I turned away and moved back, into another open area that matched this one on the opposite side of the stairway. Over here was another pair of tables and a lamp that I switched on, wanting to chase away the shadows that seemed to be gathering in the corners of the room. Here was the phone, the answering machine, and a note. Not a journal entry, but a note written from mom and apparently responded to by Sam.

 _Sam-  
Daniel from the old neighborhood called. He wants to come see the new house. Call him back._

 _Mom! Daniel is a  
TOTAL WEIRDO.  
The only reason I ever hung  
out with him in the first place  
is he had a Nintendo when  
we were little!_

More guilt. Sam was right. Daniel was totally weird...and he didn't really have any friends. He was our next door neighbor. He was the first kid our age we knew outside of school. We'd all _gone_ to school together, but he lived so close. We went over to his house like _all_ the time. Okay, maybe I was lying when I said all I'd played was Doom. Maybe I just didn't like to remember it because, for some reason, when I told anyone that I'd totally played The Legend of Zelda or Mario or Simon's Quest, they got weirded out...girls didn't play video games!

What a bunch of crap.

The game I remember the most was this awful game called Fester's Quest, based off the old Addams Family show. It was so bad and Daniel sucked at it so much, we all did because it was a horribly made game, but he insisted that it was good!

I smiled at the memory...but then I frowned again. I was just as guilty of essentially using Daniel for his Nintendo as Sam was. He was so weird, (he ate paper and had this weird obsession with mountains, like mountains all over the world, where they were, how tall they were, who had climbed them, he never shut up about them!), that people didn't really like talking to him. So he was starved for attention. Ugh, not something I wanted to think about.

I realized that the light on the answering machine was blinking. Well, I'd left two messages. Maybe mom and dad, or Sam, had left one.

I hit play.

My second message played first, the one I'd made back at the airport in Portland, no big surprise there, but the next one caught me off guard and made me jump. I didn't recognize the voice, it was a girl's voice, maybe someone around my or Sam's age. She was obviously crying, obviously very upset about something.

" _Sam, where are you?...I really...need to talk to you. Please be there..."_

A friend of Sam's? Did that have anything to do with why she had left? Was a friend of hers in trouble somewhere? She sounded horrible and even though I didn't know her at all, I had no idea what her situation was, not even her _name_ , my heart wrenched at the sound of distraught anguish in her voice and I felt horrible for her.

The machine clicked again, startling me out of my thoughts.

" _Hi mom, uh, so I got my ticket home from Europe. I get back on June 6_ _th_ _, but it's a really late flight because that was the cheapest, so it gets in at midnight. But don't worry, I'll get a shuttle from the airport so you don't have to pick me up...like, really, seriously, you don't have to. Okay, so, love you! See you soon! Bye."_

That was my first message, left hours and hours ago, back when I was in Europe. Ugh, my voice. I hate listening to my own voice, it sounds so...lame. I started hunting for a letter or a phone number or _something_ to help me in my search for my family, but there was nothing. And, as if to make the whole thing worse, I spied a big family photo hanging on the wall. My mom had insisted on taking it about a month before I left for Europe, since I was back for the summer. Looking it over reminded me of some things I'd rather not think about.

Like how much prettier Sam was than me because she'd gotten mom's looks, or how dumb my eyebrows looked, or the fact that I seemed to have gotten dad's looks...I didn't think he was ugly or anything but, ugh, his features just didn't look good on me. I also hated how dumb my smile looked in the picture, and, well, I could tell that Sam was forcing the smile...but mom at least looked very natural with it, and dad, ha, he looked a little goofy. It wasn't that I thought I was ugly or anything, but I'd always known (and, yeah, I'll admit it, been jealous of the fact) that Sam was the pretty one of the two of us.

Suddenly an idea struck me...was that why mom and dad were hard on her? Was it their way of apologizing to me? No...that was being paranoid. I really think parents are blind, they think all their kids are the greatest things ever. Or am I wrong there, too? There's something I was missing, but I had no idea what it was.

So, turning away from the picture, I moved towards a final door in the room that I prayed was unlocked.

I didn't want to go back upstairs, not yet.

I opened the door.


	5. Chapter 04: Snooping

(Un)Fun Fact! My new home was apparently built by someone who was a huge fan of long, dark, creepy hallways.

I lingered in the doorway, peering into the darkness. For a second...I thought I saw something move. I could feel my heart kick in my chest and start to pulse harder. Swallowing, telling myself that I was just seeing things, being paranoid over nothing, I took a quick look around. There was another one of those push-button things to the right, a little ways in. I fought my fear and took the two steps in, reached out and hit it.

Light sprang into existence.

The hallway was a lot less intimidating in the light...although I didn't like the way the one at the end of the hall flickered for several seconds before finally coming on fully. Now, to continue my search...the first two things I noticed immediately were a door to my left and another one of those fancy tables with cubbies and shelves built into it to the right, a little further away. The door was closer, so it won the contest of what got explored first.

Surprise, surprise...another closet. But this one had another piece of paper immediately in view, sticking up out of a backpack resting on a pile of boxes. I did a quick search of the closet to make sure there was nothing else interesting hiding around, then knelt in front of the backpack. There were two papers, actually, and a button stuck to the front of the pack with _Heavens to Betsy_ scrawled across it, complete with a disturbingly detailed drawing of a human heart done up as well. Must be one of Sam's yelly-screamy girl bands.

I grabbed the papers and took a seat in the closet, stretching my legs out and looking through them. The top one was just a bland piece of prep paper from the school. You know the kind, the ones that are over-joyously welcoming you to yet another year of high school, the kind that's packed with exclamation marks!

As if anyone is actually excited about the summer coming to a close and a return to the drudgery of high school.

There was a list of stuff that Sam had crossed off, you know, stuff you need to get through the year. The only thing she hadn't crossed off was _-A positive attitude!_ Ugh, I get that the people who write these things don't want to make it sound too bland or too just-the-facts, but all this enthusiasm just comes off as so...fake, you know what I mean? I put it back and turned my attention to the next page, which was another journal entry!

No fake enthusiasm here.

 _Step. 6, 1994_

" _First Day of School"_

 _Oh my god. You are so lucky you finished high school  
before we moved into this house.  
So, it's the first day of school, and there I am,  
introducing myself to the class, and I say that I just  
moved into the house on Arbor Hill. All of a sudden,  
EVERY kid in the room turns and just STARES like I  
suddenly transformed into a mutant. I just stood there,  
wishing pretty hard for a rewind button. Because now  
maybe nobody knows my name, but they all know who  
I am: "The Psycho House Girl."  
Great._

I could almost hear her reading it to me as I read it. Poor Sam. Despite her looks, she never really seemed to have it easy in school. She made friends, but it always seemed kind of like an ordeal for her. Sometimes she got into fights...sighing, I folded up the paper and put it into my pocket. Why not? I wanted to build a collection of them. I got up, feeling my back pop as I did, then I stepped out of the closet and stretched.

Time to check out the fancy table.

The first thing that jumped out at me was one of the postcards I'd sent back. This one had been from Paris. Wow, what a time that was. Lots of memories that, here and now, in this huge mansion, seemed very distant. Pulling open the drawer, I found two things of interest. The first was a picture of a very beautiful blonde girl that I didn't recognize. She looked to be about Sam's age. She was in a military get up and there were other military people in the background. A stern black nametag on her chest read: **DESOTO**.

Who was she?

I put it back after staring at it for a little bit longer, deciding that I really didn't recognize her at all and figuring maybe she was a new friend of Sam's, then picked up the other item. It was a clipping from a newspaper article, an obituary.

I read it over.

 _OSCAR "DOC" MASAN_

 _Oscar Masan, 60, of  
Boon County, died  
peacefully last month  
in his home._

 _Mr. Masan was born_  
 _on September 8,_  
 _1933, in the house_  
 _that would be his_  
 _home for the rest of_  
 _his life. He attained_  
 _his degree in_  
 _Pharmacy at a young age, and returned to_  
 _Boon County to practice. He quickly became_  
 _a well-loved figure at the center of the community._

 _In the decades proceeding his passing he was  
seldom seen outside his home._

 _A service will be held this Sunday at the First  
Methodist Church at 1:00 PM. All are welcome._

 _His survivors include his nephew, Terrance  
Greenbriar, as well as, in spirit, the people of  
Boon County, to whom he provided wellness  
and comfort._

There was a picture included, a man with glasses in a suit with an awkward smile who vaguely resembled dad.

"So," I mumbled, "you're great uncle Oscar."

I guess we owed him this new house and, in a roundabout way, I guess I owed him this adventure I was on. I replaced the obit and checked out the other nooks and crannies, but there was nothing left. Time to move on. There was another door on the right side of the hall, closed. I opened it up, finding another room that wasn't totally dark. There was a little lamp with a green metal covering over it on my right.

I recognized that lamp.

It was dad's lamp, for his office.

I reached out and found another light button, pushed it and watched the lights spring into existence. Oh man, this was dad's office. Suddenly, my adventure had turned into something else: snooping. I suppose I'd done my fair share of it in the past and dad had always been shooing me out of his office as a kid. I thought I'd grown out of it...but, ugh, the urge was too much! I just had to know, I _had_ to know people's secrets.

I know, it's wrong, but…

When am I ever going to get another opportunity like this?

Besides, Sam would totally hide something in here for me.

Dad's office was kind of a mess. A tall bookshelf to the left crammed with books, dad's desk and a filing cabinet to the right, his rolling chair pushed to the middle of the floor, marooned on a sea of dark hardwood and another one of those fancy tables across the room. I wish I knew what to call them, I'm sure there's a name for them, I just don't know it. Fancy table it is then, apparently great uncle Oscar had like a million of them.

I decided to start with the bookshelf first. I wasted a few minutes scanning over dad's books. Only a few of them really leaped out at me: Atonement by Hollcroft, The Complete Iching by Chu, whatever _that_ was.

I almost missed the bottle of booze, its glass neck peeking out over the top of the bookshelf. Reluctantly, I stood up on my tip-toes and snagged it. Irish Whiskey. I frowned intently, studying it, then carefully put it back. Maybe there were some secrets I didn't want to know. I remember dad having a problem with drinking about ten years ago. I was too young to really know, but I don't think it ever got crazy out of control.

No AA, no DTs, no DWIs...I think. But I do remember it stopped and mom made kind of a big deal out of it. She sat me and Sam down one December day and said that dad was going to be in a really bad mood for the next week or two and we had to go easy on him. When I asked why, she said he was quitting drinking but wouldn't really explain more. I was at least old enough to know she meant drinking beer, (back then, to me, all alcohol was beer, and it was horrible, I once accidentally took a sip of dad's Budweiser, mistaking it for my can of soda...I didn't even swallow, I ran to the sink and spit it out, haven't taken a drink since), but Sam thought she meant drinking _anything_. For about a year she looked confused whenever he drank some water or soda, but she at least got the feeling not to ask any questions about it.

Eventually I explained it to her.

So dad was drinking again...was it a big deal? I remember he'd been in a kind of depressive slump over the past few years. He'd published two books a long time ago, but they hadn't really done all that well. I knew he now had a job writing product descriptions for new pieces of technology, and it at least helped pay the bills, but I knew it wasn't the same. It always depressed me. Mom was living her dream...dad was writing freaking product reviews.

The only thing interesting I found in the fancy table was an 'Electrical Inspection Form'. I guess it was to see if the house was up to code. I learned two things. The first was that apparently the mansion was at _least_ a century old. Man, talk about ancient! The second was that due to all sorts of crazy wiring that had been added in over all that time, now the house had unpredictable electrical issues, though none of them were technically unsafe. It did say that walking around 'disrupts circuits wired directly behind the surface' and 'lights blink out for no clear reason'.

Yeah, as if the place wasn't creepy enough as it was.

I replaced the paper and kept hunting.

There was a book on dad's chair in the center of the room. Another one of his crazy JFK conspiracy novels. Not one he'd written, someone else's book. I always thought that was so strange...what a weird thing to be obsessed with.

His desk was cluttered with papers and markers, and apparently he'd left his most recent product review in the word processor. I remember when he got this thing. It was basically like a more fancy typewriter and it looked kind of sci-fi.

Apparently he'd written a glowing review, or part of one at least, for an 'LD/CD Player' with a bunch of highly technical stuff added on. Apparently it cost...$999.99! What the heck!? Who would pay for that?!

My attention was drawn to another cork-board that had about twenty sticky notes slapped all over it, all of them covered in dad's scrawl about crazy JFK stuff. But I felt my heart twinge with sadness when I saw what was at the center, done up in big bold lettering: **YOU CAN DO BETTER**. I tried to tell myself that it was a motivational thing, that dad was just trying to hype himself up, (hey, we all do it sometimes, and don't we all need it every now and then?), but I knew it wasn't true. It was more like he was berating himself.

I'm sorry, dad.

I went back to the desk, figuring that, well, if I was in it, why not go all the way? I poked through the drawers and, again, almost missed something really important...there was a false bottom to the top left drawer.

There was just one thing hidden under it: a letter.

It said it was from August 10th, 1972. Jeez, a long time ago.

I started reading.

 _Hello Terrence,_

 _I write on what I hope and imagine must be a joyous  
occasion. News reaches me that you are newly married  
to a wonderful young woman. I have had more than a  
little time, during my long days and nights at the house  
on Arbor Hill, to consider my past and my family, and  
my thoughts have often lingered on your development  
and welfare in the ten years since we last met. Your  
marriage gives me much reassurance in this regard._

 _I wish you and your new bride many happy years  
together. You are always welcome on Arbor Hill,  
though I will understand of course if you feel you  
cannot accept this invitation._

 _Yours very sincerely,  
Oscar Masan_

Slowly, carefully, I folded up the letter, which had been very hard to read, as it was ancient and, in some places, torn. I put it back in the envelope from which I'd plucked it, replaced it and the false bottom and set the 3-ring binder that had originally been atop it back in place. Then I closed the drawer. I suddenly wondered why dad had never mentioned his uncle Oscar. I stood there for almost five minutes thinking about it, then decided that no, I had never heard about Oscar. Why was that? This letter seemed to suggest that something had happened.

Why wouldn't my dad want to come back here?

What had happened?


	6. Chapter 05: Dad's Office

As uncomfortable as all this made me, I could still feel a dry need, almost a hunger, somewhere inside of me.

I wanted to know more.

I tried to tell myself that maybe I'd find something happy, something to balance out all these sad or weird things I'd found. That's when I noticed a ball of crumpled up papers not far from my foot, beside a wastebasket next to the desk. I crouched and retrieved them, smoothing them out. After reading through them, I quickly realized that they were my dad's attempts at writing. I didn't get it, it was out there sci-fi stuff with space stations and time travel...but he was writing again! I felt vindicated. _This_ was happy news, _this_ was worth snooping for.

Dad was writing what he loved again!

I crumpled the paper back up and replaced it, intent on leaving everything as I had found it. Obviously I didn't want anyone to _know_ I was snooping. The only thing left in dad's office was his filing cabinet...only it was new. It wasn't like his old one, this one had a combination lock on the top of the three drawers.

Okay, I _had_ to get in there.

The other two were unlocked, and rightly so. Skimming through them, all I found was a bunch of old rejection slips from publications and tax stuff. Where would he hide the combo? I knew dad sometimes had trouble remembering things, so, at my and mom's pressing, he'd eventually started writing stuff down to remember it. Obviously it wasn't in his desk, I'd have found it. There was another door at the back of the room.

It was partially open and there was only darkness beyond.

I found another button to my left and pressed it. Way cool! We had our own library now! Bookshelves took up a lot of space to my left and right. Walking into the room, I found a slightly raised area at the back that was kind of like a little sun porch. There were a pair of chairs set up on either side of a table. Behind them and to either side were windows that, right now, showed nothing but darkness and trees and rain streaking down the glass.

Turning around, I saw the room extended and the bookshelves created a natural upside down U shape. The very first thing that caught my eye was none other than Fresh magazine! A copy of it sat on the table. Oh man, it was _so_ tempting to just sit down and start reading. A pretty blonde woman with pink lipstick and a braid in her hair looked up at me. Cover stories included: _TRUE STORIES: I WAS A TEENAGE_ _ **DRAG QUEEN**_ _!_ and _READERS TELL US ABOUT THEIR WORST MOMENTS_ and _90210: DOES ANYBODY STILL CARE?_ and, finally, _THE MALE GAZE HOW TO SUBVERT IT_. Oh man, that one's really tempting.

I'd had enough of the male gaze since hitting middle school to last me a whole lifetime, especially over in Europe. Don't get me wrong, it's nice to know that I can turn heads but...sometimes, getting stared at like a piece of meat was just total gag and more than a little annoying. Reluctantly, I replaced the magazine and crouched down, spying another piece of paper peeking out from beneath a half-folded newspaper on the bottom shelf.

It looked to be a list of book names. Another sign that dad was back on the path to success! At least, I sure hoped so.

As I turned back around, I noticed the end of the middle bookshelves came with doors on the bottom and they were partially open. I could see something inside...surprise, surprise, curiosity came calling again.

I crouched down and opened it, finding a box that, once I pulled the top off, I saw was packed with copies of my dad's books. _The Accidental Pariah by Terrance L. Greenbriar_. Dad's second book. The cover left something to be desired. It was just plain text against a black background with JFK's face through a keyhole, not even properly centered. As I began to put it back, I noticed that the box wasn't actually packed with copies of dad's books.

There was something underneath...a magazine?

I dug through the books and pulled it out, then immediately regretted it. It was a copy of a girlie magazine which had, I'm sure, naked ladies between the covers. Ew. Gross. I hastily put it back, trying to block mental images of my freakin' _dad_ looking at this. I wasn't gonna judge but seriously, gross. I got it all back in place and closed the doors.

Okay, definitely time to move on.

In the end, there was just one more thing in the room worth checking out...and it made me sad all over again. I found a manila folder sitting near the back of the room, on a clear space in one of the bookshelves. As I opened it, I spied a piece of paper with flat black text typed up on it and, oh boy, **0451** printed on the inside of the folder. Hello combination! I picked up the paper and started reading it, my frown getting deeper by the second.

 _Dear Terrance,_

 _David asked me to write you regarding the reviews  
you've been submitting the last few months. Frankly  
they're becoming more trouble than they're worth  
from an editing standpoint. There's a word limit-  
it's your job to stay under it, not mine to cut  
back to it. Even then it's becoming harder and  
harder to weed out the tangents and non sequiturs  
from the usable copy without heavy rewrites. The  
readers of Home Theater Aficianado want to hear  
about the quality and value of the hardware, not  
ruminations on your childhood!_

 _If it were up to me I wouldn't be writing this  
letter. I'd just be cutting you loose. There's  
tons of guys half your age who would take half  
your rate to write stuff I could actually use._

 _But David's known you for a long time, and he's  
the boss, so I'm giving you one more shot on his  
say-so. You should write him a nice note thanking  
him for his patience and generosity._

 _Look through your old stuff and start submitting  
reviews like that again. Then everybody will be  
happy._

 _Brent Kurtwood  
Reviews Editor, Home Theater Aficionado Magazine_

Oh no, dad...I felt suddenly a little ill with worry. If dad lost his job...I don't know what we'd end up doing. I got the feeling that this mansion was paid off, so that was at least a decent portion of the monthly bills my parents wouldn't have to pay...but how much was it in utilities? Did that even matter, if dad lost his job? Could we survive on mom's income alone? I felt lucky that my grandparents had set aside a pretty decent college fund for me and Sam, and that I'd busted ass in high school to get some scholarships.

I'd come out of college, (hopefully), with almost no debt.

But what about mom and dad? What about Sam?

I carefully folded the manila folder back and walked through the library, retracing my steps, feeling very distracted as I came up to the filing cabinet and put in the code. It clicked open. I pulled the drawer out and checked inside. I only found one thing of interest: Oscar's will. Besides all the regular legal yada yada, it said that everything went to dad. Why? Grandma and Grandpa were still alive…

I couldn't find any other clues, so I replaced it, closed the drawer and locked it, putting the combo back to all sevens, like it had been at first. For a moment, I just stood there, looking around dad's office, lingering, wonderful if maybe I should stop. I'd found out a few things so far that I kind of wish I hadn't. But, on the other hand...well, I was a firm believer in the 'knowledge is power' kind of idea, not exactly an 'ignorance is bliss' kind of girl. It was a tough decision, but I knew I had to go on, even if only to discover what had happened to Sam.

With a sigh, I left dad's office behind.


	7. Chapter 06: Flood Warning

As I stepped out of dad's office, still feeling in a bit of shock, I looked around, trying to plan my next move. The hallway ended not far off to my right, making a turn out of sight to the right, and to the left was an open door. I began to head towards the door, but then I noticed another wastebasket at the corner of the turn in the hall...and another crumpled up piece of paper. I knelt, grabbed it, smoothed it out and read it.

It was tough, because it had been torn in two.

It was Sam's handwriting, and someone else's I didn't recognize, but I did immediately recognize the style: it was a note, passed back and forth in class. A silent conversation during the intolerably boring hours of chemistry or math.

I was glad to be out of high school.

 _Hey are you that new girl Sam? I'm Tommy, I'm  
at the back behind you wave if you get this wave  
and write back._

 _Hi Tommy. Yes, I'm Samantha and yes  
I'm new. What's up?_

 _I just thought since youre new maybe you  
could use a friend. I don't have a lot of friends  
either and so I thought Id ask something  
if you dont mind do you mind?_

 _Y/N_

She'd circled N.

 _No I don't mind. What did you want to ask?_

 _Was it just your uncle who went psycho  
or does it run in the family_

Fucking asshole! I felt so bad for Sam. I remembered how hard it could be in school. I knew I'd had it relatively easy. No one really seemed to want to mess with me, but Sam was kind of a magnet for that kind of stuff. People were always messing with her. Apparently her bad luck had followed her to this new school... _ugh_! This was so sucky, and I hadn't been there for her at all. I tore the paper up some more and threw it all into the wastebasket, disgusted. This Tommy asshole better hope I never meet him.

As I approached the open door, I began to hear something...it was talking.

Someone was talking. A man. I felt my body begin to go cold and my heart start to hammer faster. Was someone in here? But as I listened, I realized it sounded like it was coming from a speaker...I peeked into the room and relief flooded through me. Just a TV. A pre-recorded sound bite was warning of extreme weather and flooding in the area and I guess we'd lost the cable. I looked around the room. Apparently I'd found the living room, or maybe it was the TV room.

There was a fireplace to the right and bookshelves to the left, hugging the walls. A big L-shaped couch took up the center of the room, facing the TV. The TV and a single floor lamp were all that were providing light. I don't know why, but I'm the kind of person that needs a lot of light in the room. I always have a minimum of two lamps wherever I live, in addition to the overhead light, three lamps if I can help it.

Mom and dad were always griping about the electric bill and now I felt kind of guilty about that, all the arguments we'd had. But man, I needed light! Shadows bugged me for some reason. It wasn't even a fear thing, (well, normally, this place was kind of creepy though), it was just a...I don't know _what_ it was, all I know is that I need lots of light.

So, naturally, I flipped on the lights the room came with, as well as a lamp on an endtable right in front of me, next to the couch. From my view, I could see that Sam had built a little fort against the couch out of cushions and a blanket. On the endtable I was standing at, I found a page torn from a TV Guide.

The X-Files had been circled.

Of course. Sam loved the X-Files. I walked in front of the couch, in between it and a coffee table that had been shoved aside to make way for the fort. There was a box of pizza from a place called Amore Pizza. Empty, of course. And very greasy, too. I came around to the front of the little fort Sam had made. As I crouched and looked inside, finding a can of Dr. Jitters soda and a book called Hauntings & Poltergeists, I was suddenly hit by a wave of incredibly powerful grief and lonely nostalgia.

How many forts like this had Sam and I made on late weekend nights, eating pizza rolls, drinking Coke, and watching X-Files? I realized that, as much as we had done it growing up...it had been several years since I'd partaken in any pillow-fort building. And not just because I'd been gone at college. I suddenly missed my sister so painfully that I felt tears welling in my eyes. I hadn't seen her for a whole entire year and now, on the day I get back, she's gone.

What was worse, she had built a pillow fort…

Had she been thinking of me?

Trying to recreate better times?

I sniffed, wiped my eyes and stood up. I had to find out what happened to her. In the couch, I found a ticket to The Coliseum, a movie theater. It was a movie ticket from October last year to see...Pulp Fiction. Oh man, mom would flip if she knew Sam had seen that. I'm surprised it had never been discovered.

I tucked it far away beneath one of the cushions, out of respect, thinking of guns, Samuel L. Jackson, and a Royale with cheese.

Investigation of the coffee table turned up another button you could pin to your jacket or backpack, hidden away in a closed off middle section with doors. It read **BRATMOBILE**. Pretty sure it was another one of Sam's favorite screamy girl bands. I put it back and moved over to the fireplace. When it turned up nothing, I moved on, finding a note next to an open box on a table beneath an ugly, washed out painting hung on the wall.

I think it was supposed to be like...a farm? The painting, not the letter.

The letter was from the company my dad worked for, going on about the thing my dad was supposed to be writing a review about. The note was from David, and it sounded upbeat enough, but reading it, I sensed maybe a note of worry or hesitation between the lines...or was that only because I'd already read the sternly-written letter from the other jerk-face? I sighed and replaced it, moving on to the TV and the stand it rested atop.

There was a book next to the TV...Making Friends, and there was a note attached to it: _Sam- thought this might help. -Dad._ On the back, it read: _Feeling Lonely? It's a piece of cake to make friends! Never worry again about having friends to spend time with! This book will teach you to MAKE FRIENDS, EVEN WHEN YOU'RE SHY!_

Oh dad…

Sam was a lot of things, but she wasn't exactly shy. As I began to put the book back, suddenly, a loose sheet of paper fell out of it. Another journal entry from Sam! Setting the book back, I quickly retrieved the errant paper and began reading.

 _Step. 13, 1994_

" _Big Gold Star"_

 _You know that feeling, where the first moment you  
see someone it's like they have a big gold star around  
them, and you HAVE to get to know them?_

 _Well, there's this girl, I think she's a senior. She's  
usually dressed.. kind of punk. But sometimes I see her  
in this, like, army uniform? And she's always drawing  
in this notebook, looking so intense. I had no idea how  
I would ever, like, have an excuse to talk to her… 'Til I  
notice she and her friends hang out and play Street  
Fighter at the 7-11 every day after school…_

I couldn't help but smile. Sam was making friends just fine! Obviously, she must be talking about the mysterious Desoto I'd found a picture of. So it must have worked out, why else would Sam have a picture of her around? I tucked the journal entry into my pocket and kept scoping out the big stand the TV was resting on.

I found hook-ups for a Super Nintendo, but the SNES in question was nowhere to be seen. Huh. There were also a bunch of VHS tapes around. Most of them were blank, but I found _2001|The Dark Crystal_ and _X-Files Season 1 Eps 18-21._ It was about that time that the repeating message from the TV, listing Flood Conditions for a bunch of counties, started getting to me, so I turned the TV off. Tucked away in the corner was another door…

It led to, surprise!, a closet.

The only thing I found in here was a bunch of old pages stapled together. Staring at the cover of spiral notebook paper, which was covered in turtle stickers and had a cute little drawing of two women on a beach beside a big boat, I realized I had just gotten my hands on Sam's story. She'd written it back in second grade. It was titled: _The Hevin at the Edge of the world_. Oh man, Sam would be so embarrassed if she knew I was holding this.

I flipped through it, smiling, feeling amused. It was about Captain Allegra, a courageous woman looking for paradise on the high seas and struggling against pirates. It described a brief confrontation that ended favorably for the good Captain and her loyal First Mate. I remember when Sam had written this. She'd gotten an A+ on it and when dad had read it, he had been trying to hide the fact that he was crying.

I think he was so proud because his daughter was following in his footsteps.

Well...that hadn't exactly turned out how he'd imagined, I think.

I moved on to the bookshelves. They were packed with dad's old vinyls and a whole bunch of VHS tapes that dad had recorded off of TV. There were such classics as The Time Machine, Clue, Fantastic Voyage, Top Gun, and The Andromeda Strain. Further investigation turned up a lot more X-Files, (of course), Moonraker, Airplane!, Blade Runner: The Director's Cut (a true classic!), Robocop, Beetle Juice, and something simply labeled JFK.

Of course, because no dad collection was complete without it.

At least not _my_ dad.

I found another letter in a box with dad's first book: The Accidental Savior. The letter was from his old high school friend Mike. I wasn't ever really comfortable with Mike, mainly cause he always left the house smelling like booze. He always got dad drinking whenever he was around and...well, eventually, he'd stopped coming around. I think that was mom. She never liked him either, neither did Sam. Poor dad. We all kind of ganged up on him for that.

But here, Mike was at least being a good friend. I guess I was reading the letter that had got dad his current job...I looked at the date and did a double-take. 1978...was that possible? Had dad really been writing these reviews for this long? For...for almost twenty years? That couldn't be right...could it? Could it? Had he really been stuck writing reviews for that long? I felt a little ill again, trying to imagine doing a job that was a pale imitation of my dream job for half my life…

I couldn't do it, so I stopped trying to imagine and put the letter back.

The only other thing I found was a cassette tape with _Girlscout_ written on it next to a tape player. I knew what would happen if I put it in: a bunch of girls screaming and guitars going crazy. Sam loved the stuff but I never could get into it at all.

I moved back to the doorway of the TV room, stopping once to look over it again, feeling fear and nostalgia and worry creeping up on me.

Then I turned and left, heading deeper into the house.


	8. Chapter 07: More Bad News

I was determined to find more good news.

There had to be good news, somewhere in this house. As I stepped back into the hallway, I thought about my own state of mind. I was what you'd call a realist, or maybe that's what I call it. I'm not pessimistic like Sam is, but I think that's just because I'm naturally kind of lucky...and she's naturally kind of unlucky. I have no idea why that is. Is it fair? I don't know, probably not. But, like practically every cynic _loves_ to point out: life isn't fair.

Some of my friends tell me that I need everything to be nice.

I don't think that's true...I just don't like conflict, or unhappiness.

I looked down the next hallway ahead of me, the way I hadn't gone yet. It was at least pretty simple. Just one door and a simple table. Well lit, to boot! For the first time, the details of the house itself seemed to leap out at me. All the walls were split in half, the bottom being done up in an old polished wood paneling and the top half covered in odd pinkish (mauve? I'm a little colorblind…) wallpaper with curvy designs that kinda looked like flowers...sort of? I don't know what they were actually supposed to be.

On the floor, there was a _really_ long carpet that had more indecipherable designs along it. Well, I guess the place wasn't actually ugly. Honestly, given its age, I thought it was in shockingly good shape. How many people had lived here?

How many people had died here…

Just one, as far as I knew. The idea that a man had died here, a family member nonetheless, made me shiver and glance back over my shoulder. I didn't really believe in ghosts...but I didn't exactly _not_ believe in them. Does that make any sense? Let's just say that I'm not convinced one way or the other. Well, I'd spent enough time lingering. I moved down about half the length of the hall, stopping at a dark wood table pushed up against the right wall. There was a potted plant with big, healthy, serrated leaves on it, (mom's no doubt, she _loves_ gardening), some pens, a book of coupons and a pamphlet, a US National Forestry Manual.

All of this was presided over by a painting hung just above the table. It was a winter setting, like you were standing at the edge of a forest and looking out over a snowbound plain that led up to a mountain off in the distance. I actually really liked this one. It reminded me of that guy who had that show...Bob Ross. I used to watch his show all the time. I'd heard he was sick, actually, like really sick. For some reason, the thought of him dying scared me. It was almost like he was too good a person to die, like the Earth needed him.

I tried to push away the thoughts of death and unhappiness. I turned away from the painting and moved a little further down the hall, opening the door in the left wall. There was some light in this room, but it was blocked by a large bookshelf taking up the middle of the floorspace, plus it was across the way, on the far side.

I turned on the overheads and a floor lamp, brightening up the area considerably. Was this another library? No...not quite. As I began walking around the bookshelves in the center of the room, I realized where I was. Really, it was just two long bookshelves pushed up against each other, and a smaller, narrower shelf pushed up against the end. The narrow bookshelf was the one facing me, and it was packed with books.

But the other shelves were packed with vinyls. And as I got a better view of the back of the room, I saw a chair next to a little endtable and a cabinet with a glass-topped record player sitting on it. The music room! We had our own music room now! Man, this place was _fancy_. I walked over to the chair and table, tucked away into the far right corner of the room and found some things there. Flipping on the little lamp perched on the table, I spied another can of soda, a book on world history, and a folder. Had to be Sam's.

I sat down and grabbed the folder.

Inside, there were a few pieces of paper stapled together. I immediately recognized the unhappy small black print of a high school assignment. I even recognized the assignment. Basically, it was a 'put the sentences in order' assignment, the sentences being awkwardly detailed descriptions of the male and female reproductive cycle.

It was a straightforward enough assignment.

But not for Sam, apparently. You were supposed to choose one of the collection of sentences, either the male or female reproductive cycle, and then put them in chronological order. It was like super easy...but apparently Sam had taken it as a damned challenge. I spent the next five minutes worriedly reading over the next two pages. Sam had written a short story about a young woman in World War Two who had, despite trying so hard, lost the love of her life to a gruesome bombing from German planes. Then she decides 'to join the Polish resistance as a daring spy and saboteur'. Definitely a Sam story, though it was grimmer and bloodier than I was used to.

At the bottom, written in red, was: _See me!_

Back when I'd gotten this assignment, I thought it was strange enough on its own, but here, apparently, Sam had gotten the _same_ thing at a totally different school. I sighed softly and put the paper back. Sam...always had to take that last step, to push the situation over the edge. I don't really know why, she just had to cause trouble. Sometimes, times like these, I thought that maybe Sam was the result of her own bad luck.

Why didn't she just do the freaking assignment? Why did she have to write this whacked-out story when she _knew_ it would get her in trouble?

Sighing softly, I stood up and then paused, noticing a pencil on the floor. Out of habit, I knelt and picked it up. As I replaced it on the table, lightning flared and thunder boomed overhead, making the house tremble again. At that same moment, I found myself looking across the room, into the corner I hadn't yet seen.

It felt like a bad omen.

Tucked into this corner was a little bar, as in, a place you went to drink. Approaching cautiously, I moved slowly behind it, already not liking what I saw: shot glasses. There were three empty ones on the bar and two more on the floor behind it. I also counted at least three bottles of booze stashed away. Definitely a bad sign.

Looking down, I saw a pair of small glass-fronted cabinet doors leading to a little space beneath the bar. There was a box down there, with a book and a paper. It was another one of dad's books. I grabbed the paper, it was filled with lettered typing.

It was an old letter, dated way back in '76.

 _Dear Mr. Greenbriar,_

 _I write to inform you that, unfortunately, Mercury  
Books will be unable to publish your follow-up to  
_ _The Accidental Pariah_ _. Despite the low sales of  
The Accidental Savior_ _, we went ahead with  
publication of the second book in hopes of the  
John Russell series "catching on". However, sales  
of the second book have in fact been lower than  
those of the first, and so our stewardship of  
the series must end here._

 _It has been a pleasure working as your publisher,  
and we wish you, and John Russell, the best in  
your future endeavors._

As I read this letter, I had a sinking feeling in my stomach. At first, it was just feeling sorry for dad, but then it was confusion. I'll be completely honest...I didn't ever really follow dad's career. I mean, I know about his two books, I'd even made myself read the first one all the way through two years ago, but it just wasn't my thing. But suddenly, it didn't add up. Dad had enjoyed at least some success way back then. When this letter had come, I was still in diapers, maybe just starting to walk. Sam hadn't been born yet.

Dad had written, and gotten published, these two books about time-travel conspiracy theories and JFK...and they'd tanked. For a long time, I'd just felt a vague kind of sadness over the knowledge. I'd known, at least peripherally, that dad hadn't had a book published in a long time, but for years and years I had taken it for granted that he was happy with his life. As a kid, even as a teenager, I kind of thought all adults were, unless it was extremely obvious that they weren't. Only just recently had I begun to contemplate the idea that he was drowning in a sea of misery...for _years_. So yeah, I felt sorry for him...but now I just had to ask the question:

Why?

Why had he just...given up? Or, more importantly, why didn't he give up the JFK stuff? Why had he continued with the research and the obsession and the note-taking for _decades_? Surely he had other ideas kicking around in his head. Why had he been so relentless in his pursuit to get JKF-related books published, books that obviously most people didn't want to read about, when he knew he had a family to take care of?

I put the letter back and stood up, leaving the bar behind.

The only thing left in the room was a closet. Man, this house was packed with them. I opened the door and pulled the pull-string. There was another big bookshelf packed with vinyls, some boxes full of hardback copies of dad's first book, and, stuffed into the pocket of a coat hanging up, I saw a note. I grabbed it.

 _Samantha: Please give this to your mother._

It was a note from Daniel's mom, I realized...thanking my mom for having him over. Apparently he wanted to let Sam borrow Street Fighter. Oh boy...did Sam cave, or did mom force it? As I began to put the note back, (obviously Sam had forgotten to give it to mom, big surprise there), I found something else deeper in the pocket.

Another journal to me from Sam!

 _Sept. 15, 1994_

" _Default Friends"_

 _When you live in one place your whole life, your next  
door neighbor is kind of like, your default friend. And  
Daniel only got weirder over the years. So moving away  
has been a good excuse to like...not see him anymore.  
But he did always have the good Nintendo games…  
Maybe I'll give him a call._

I felt more of that guilt from before as I put the paper in my back pocket. This was not one of Sam's better sides...but I couldn't talk. I'd done the same thing, growing up. Except that she was old enough now to know not to use people. It wasn't right. I didn't still do that, did I? I didn't think so, but what if I was wrong?

This night was _not_ turning out how I'd expected or wanted it to.

I turned and left the closet, heading back into the hallway.


	9. Chapter 08: Return to the Second Floor

Leaving the music room and the unhappy thoughts behind, (or _trying_ to at least!), I finished walking down the hall. It made a left-hand turn and, oh boy, it was finally at an end! These freaking halls were so long! There was a dresser with a lamp on it that I flicked on almost automatically and a door at the end of the hallway.

First, I tried the door.

Locked?! You've got to be kidding me!

I didn't know where it led, but its placement made me think of a basement. Where else would this lead? Well, a closet, I guess. The fact of the matter was, I wasn't finding out without a key. And, of course, the house key didn't work. Trying not to get into the bad habit of sighing in frustration all the time, I began to turn back to the dresser, but then paused as I saw a wastebasket tucked away in the corner. It had a balled up piece of paper in it.

Well, why not?

My heart skipped a beat when I read it.

 _Katie,_

 _Please, whatever you've found,  
don't tell mom and dad.  
The attic_

It was all scribbled out. Sam had written this...maybe even a few hours ago. Okay, something had to be behind this door. I needed to find a key...but I was at a dead end! At least, as far as I could tell, there was nowhere left for me to go...on the first floor. Ugh, I didn't want to go back upstairs. It was even creepier up there for some reason.

I turned back and then decided to check out the dresser and move on. I found another note from Sam on top of it, also written tonight, asking me to please tell our parents sorry for the missing stuff. Missing stuff? I suddenly thought of the SNES attachments. Well, it was certainly missing. Why the heck would she take an SNES without the attachments?

I shuffled through the drawers and found a big bonus in the bottom one. First, there was some writing between Sam and this other girl, who was apparently named Lonnie. Huh, Lonnie Desoto. Interesting name. Basically, Sam was asking this girl if she wanted to come check out the mansion and apparently Lonnie was totally down for it. She'd even done a little Street Fighter drawing of two hands throwing a Hadoken…

Okay, yeah, so maybe I was into Street Fighter, too. So sue me.

More importantly, I found another journal. Jackpot!

 _Oct. 3, 1994_

" _Best-Laid Plans"_

 _So you know what they say about the best-laid plans of  
mice and men. Yeah, turns out it applies to Street  
Fighter, too. At least, I worked up the courage to walk  
into the 7-11 and ask for a turn, but all that practice at  
home did not exactly translate in the wild._

 _So after I was finished getting my butt kicked, I  
followed them outside while they smoked, and that  
was when SHE asked me if I was "that Psycho House  
girl." But then, she said she's always wanted to see the  
Psycho House._

 _Her name's Lonnie. She's coming over tomorrow._

That made me happy, at least. Sam had definitely made a friend. Based on what I'd read, this Lonnie girl definitely sounded up Sam's alley. Dressing punk, smoking, playing Street Fighter...yep, Sam Friend Material to be sure.

Tucking the journal away in my pocket, I began making my way back through the house. This time, when I got up to the second story landing, I flipped on a little lamp perched on a dresser there. Searching it over, I only found one thing...but it was cool!

It was a newspaper clipping about a controlled burn happening at Flintlock National Park and apparently mom was the one running the show! I thought that was really neat and grinned as I read over it.

Moving back into the hallway, I glanced at the endtable where I'd found mom's planner. I hadn't noticed it the first time, but there was a drawer there. Figuring I might as well be thorough, I opened it and rooted around. All I found was a personnel transfer form. I guess they were sending someone else over to help with the burn way back then and mom was supposed to judge them. Oh man, I felt bad for whoever it was.

Mom did not judge lightly.

She had very high standards.

It was part of why she and Sam clashed so often. I closed the drawer and moved on, setting my sights on a bookshelf pushed up against the left side of the hall. Nothing on it but books, although...I found something in a little cabinet beneath it. A cassette tape case with _Bratmobile, Pottymouth_ and _For Sam_ scrawled on it.

Folded up inside the empty cassette case, I found another journal.

I was on a hot streak!

 _Oct. 4, 1994_

" _Hanging Out With Girls"_

 _It's weird hanging out with girls. Daniel was around  
ever since I was little, and other girls...I dunno. But  
being around Lonnie is like...instantly just right. I gave  
her the grand Psycho House tour, and took my revenge  
on Super Nintendo, and it was like, I dunno, I finally  
found someone I feel normal around._

 _I drove her home and she gave me this tape and said  
_ " _you have GOT to listen to this." I haven't stopped  
playing it since._

I felt a big smile on my lips. Although Sam seemed to do okay making friends, she never really seemed to make like...friend friends. Like _best_ friends, you know? Friends you told secrets to and spent the night with and hung out like _all_ the time with. It sounded like Sam had finally found this friend. But that smile was replaced slowly by a frown. The more I thought about it, the more it seemed like that mysterious voice on the answering machine...was Lonnie. Who else would be calling up, crying, begging for Sam?

I was beginning to get a clearer view of the picture...but I was still missing a lot. I needed more pieces of the puzzle.

This time, I walked up to Sam's room with the full intent to search it. Pushing open the door, I looked around for a light switch-button. When I didn't find one, I glanced up and saw that, what the heck?!, Sam's room didn't come with an overhead light! Well, no way I could use this room. Luckily, there was a floor lamp right next to me, and I clicked it on. Sam's TV was on, showing the multicolored bars of a lost signal.

Sam's room was packed, a potential treasure trove.

The wall to my right was taken up by a dresser, a TV stand, and a bookshelf/sliding door cabinet combination. Dead ahead was a closet door, partially open, sporting a colorful poster of some kind. Then, for some reason, she had a locker, right next to the closet door. Further into the room, pushed up against a slanting wall with two windows, was her bed. Opposite that, back around the door I'd pushed open to get in here, was her workstation: a desk and shelves.

Sam's room was a mess.

I decided to start with the dresser. Nothing there but a cassette for the cassette player perched atop the dresser and a lot of clothes. I moved on to the TV stand, finding a piece of paper tucked up beneath it. I thought it might be something cool, but it just turned out to be Chun Li moves. The only interesting things were more cables that were supposed to be plugged into an SNES and an SNES game called Adventurous: The Cat – Returns.

That just left the cabinet-shelf. There were just a bunch of books on the bottom, but slapped up over the sliding doors were two of those whacky designs you're suppose to go cross-eyed at and you'll see something. I did and, after a little while, managed to see something for both of them. The one on the bottom just went kind of 3D, but the one on top had a heart hidden in the middle. Huh. There were just two SNES cartridges left in the vast empty space behind the sliding doors. Nothing else at all. I studied them.

The first one was a top-down space shooter I vaguely remembered called Super Spitfire. Cause, of course, almost like everything on the SNES was called Super. The other one was a lot more memorable. It was a kind of Zelda clone, an adventure game called Journey of Crystal. I'd remembered liking it but Sam had totally obsessed over it back when we were in our early teens. She played it only about a million times. It was about a woman warrior, (super rare, it seemed, almost all the video games I came across were about guys), on an adventure to rescue her father in a dangerous land of fantastic creatures and dark magic.

If Sam was really gone...why hadn't she taken it?

I put them back and moved on to the closet. The poster she'd put up was of a music-fest from last year where a bunch of bands I didn't recognize were playing. It was called Sonic Boom '94. Definitely the kind of thing Sam would go to. Poking around the boxes and piles of stuff on the floor, I found a few interesting things. The first was a board game called Got Your Number! It looked like a knock-off of that other game, Dream Phone, they released a few years ago. I also found Sam's old binder from like fourth grade.

It had a penguin in a Hawaiian shirt and it was so bright and colorful. I'd always wondered why she'd had it then, now I wondered why she'd kept it.

Then I found something really interesting.

It was a few pages of typed text, stapled together, hidden inside of a cabinet at the back of the closet. It was a rewrite of her old second grade story, and it was...actually pretty good. She must have written this very recently. It was about three pages worth of text featuring Captain Allegra and her daring First Mate, trying to infiltrate some old king's labyrinth. It ended on a cliffhanger. It was...kind of compelling.

I wanted to read more.

Huh! So maybe Sam was following in dad's footsteps after all? Or, actually, hopefully not. Hopefully Sam had more success and luck than dad had. I left the closet and noticed a pile of pillows on the floor, in front of the TV. A piece of paper peeked out from beneath it. It was another cute little note between Sam and Lonnie in school. Apparently Lonnie was pretty good at drawing. She'd scrawled a cat on a motorcycle, driving beneath the hot desert sun. Man, they were sure a pair. Lonnie with her drawing, Sam with her photography and writing.

Made me kind of jealous. I could hardly doodle. Actually, I didn't even really have any creative skills in my body, I think. Just academic ones. For some reason, I was good at school. Like...it just came naturally to me. I never had a problem finishing homework or understanding assignments, I never got in trouble with the teachers. I'll admit it, I was basically a Straight A student. A lot of people thought that meant I loved high school.

So not true.

I didn't hate it exactly, but...well, even at a young age, I understood that I was _good_ at school, at academic stuff, and it felt good to be good at something. So I went with it. It still got boring as heck sometimes.

I abandoned the note and moved to the locker, but it was, like the name implied, locked up tight. Why so many locks in this house?! I moved on to Sam's bed, which had an _I Want To Believe_ UFO poster pinned at its foot, plus some boxes shoved between the wall and the bed, right next to a radiator...oh real smart, Sam! Burn the house down, why not? I turned on another lamp on her bedside table and spied a huge cloth with a jolly roger, (is that what it's called? it's like a pirate flag, the skull and two swords crossing beneath it), hung up over the head of her bed. There were markers and highlighters everywhere.

I couldn't help but break into a grin as I spied the only stuffed animal to survive from Sam's childhood. A stuffed green Stegosaurus called...Stelly? Steggy? Ugh, couldn't remember. I picked it up and turned it over, finding a tag with **Steggy** written on it. Steggy it was then. Standing there beside Sam's bed, I looked up at the two windows over it. I could just see the top of a tree and lightning momentarily lit up the night sky, showing me a lot of dark clouds and nothing else. How long would it rain like this?

Not that I minded the rain, I loved it, actually.

But it was making this whole situation ever creepier than it would have been otherwise.

Poking around the nightstand and beneath the bed revealed some magazines, and also a picture of a motorcycle with a note on it: _This is the one me and my dad are building! Wanna go for a ride when it's done?_ Wow...Lonnie's dad was building a motorcycle, and she was helping? Totally badass. I also found a note that made me cringe. It was a sternly worded letter from a teacher about an assignment in metalworking class.

Apparently I'd missed the fact that the old family photo had a shiny new metal plaque. Sam had been assigned to make one and apparently she'd engraved Mom and Dad into it, and when they tried to make her put our parents actual names on it, she literally just crossed Mom and Dad out and wrote in the names. The teacher was less than thrilled with this reaction, but I could totally see why Sam did it. She hated that picture more than I did!

She was really self-conscious about her looks, something we kind of got into fights over. I couldn't help but think that if Sam thought she didn't look very good, and she was obviously better looking than me, then what the heck did that say about me?! Sam never called me ugly or anything like it, never even hinted at it, she really only had encouraging things to say, but it was hard to believe it. Even now, it would still be difficult to believe.

A lot of guys did want to go to bed with me, sure...but it kind of seemed like guys would go to bed with a lot of girls. I'd hardly run into any that actually wanted to date me, though. I didn't want to think about this anymore.

The bed was a bust, so I moved over to the last place in the room: her work area. The first thing I noticed was a crumpled up piece of paper in the wastebasket. This was becoming common. I grabbed it and smoothed it out.

It was a disciplinary referral from the high school. At first I thought it was for Sam, but then I realized it was for...Yolanda Desoto? Eh...jeez, no wonder she went by Lonnie. I felt sorry for her, stuck with a name like Yolanda. Apparently Lonnie had worn a shirt with a Pabst Blue Ribbon logo on it to school and they'd snagged her for it, telling her either to turn it inside out, change it, or be suspended for the rest of the day.

Apparently she'd gone with the nuclear option and chose suspension.

It was supposed to be signed by her dad, but here it was, in the trash. And this was back in October...Sam must have had to have thrown it away just recently. I wonder why. Well, no wonder they got along so well, it was a very Sam thing to do. Okay, maybe something Sam wished she could do. Sam and authority never got along.

The last thing I found, after poking around her desk and bookshelf, was a brochure for a Summer Pre-College Creative Writing Program with a sticky note on it. _Sam: I think the creative writing track would be perfect for you. Mrs..._ something I couldn't read. Huh. If I were her, I would've taken it. But, if it was true and she was gone, obviously it was out of the question now. It seemed like the kind of thing Sam would've had a lot of fun doing.

I sighed, standing in the middle of her room, looking around. This was where she had spent a whole year almost, living here, sleeping here, hanging out with Lonnie here. Probably she spent at least some time grounded here.

But there were no clues here, no keys, no journals, just Sam's stuff.

I looked to the other door that led back out into that short hallway I'd seen earlier, the very first time I was up here, and decided to go for it.


	10. Chapter 09: The Forbidden Zone

I didn't like how dark the short hallway was, but there was at least enough light to see another potted plant at the end of it, perched on a table right up against a window. It had big, waxy leaves and almost looked fake, but I knew it wasn't. Mom wouldn't bother with fake plants. I also saw Sam's backpack up against the wall. There was a note beneath it. It was an old note, the back-and-forth conversation that had culminated in my little sister seeing Pulp Fiction. That was still kind of funny to think about.

There was just one other door, almost directly across from the one I'd just come through, so I opened it up and flipped on the light. A bathroom. The first thing I noticed was a big tub to the right, it had what, at first glance, looked like a lot of blood splashed onto it. My heart leaped into my throat...but then my eyes fell to a bottle on the floor beside it. I walked forward, knelt and grabbed the bottle.

"Whew," I whispered, letting out a sigh of relief.

Red hair dye.

I set it back down and stood up, looking along the length of the tub. I realized that the hair dye wasn't fresh...it was old, stained in, actually. Then, as I looked down to the other end of the tub, where a simple table was, I saw it.

Another journal entry.

I grabbed it and started reading.

 _Oct. 22, 1994_

" _Dealing With Roots"_

 _Lonnie brought her hair dye over today. She said, "I  
need to fix these roots. Think you could help?" Dyeing  
hair is weirdly intimate. I don't know if I've touched  
someone else's scalp before. That's pretty intimate,  
right? It felt intimate._

 _We looked into the mirror together after and I  
expected her to say something about how it looked  
crappy, or good or whatever. But that's when she said,  
_" _You're so beautiful." And she was looking at me.  
Right in that moment, I wanted to say...something. But  
I waited, and the moment was gone._

I folded up the note and slipped it into my pocket. I guess she had a point, touching, or even massaging in the case of hair dye, someone's scalp would be pretty intimate. The only other thing in the bathroom that was interesting I found when I opened up the cabinet over the sink. Printed out in block lettering, made with one of those label-makers, and slapped to the inside of the cabinet door, was: **LONNIE RULES**.

Wow, Sam really liked her.

I left the bathroom.

There was a door directly in front of the short hallway. Well, it was next on the list, I guessed, so I walked up to it, opened it up...and froze.

Mom and dad's room!

Even in my snoopiest of snooping days, I stayed out of my parent's bedroom. I just...did. You don't go in mom and dad's room. It just isn't done. But my curiosity was piqued more than ever because it looked like someone had already been through here. There were two dressers and an armoire, and a lot of the drawers were pulled open in the dresser, one of them actually pulled out all the way. Well...I'd come this far.

No going back now.

I stepped into the room.

I started by searching the nearest dresser, but all I got for my troubles was, ( _barf!_ ), a condom still in the wrapper. Ew, so gross. Not thinking about it, not thinking about it. I moved on to the armoire, which was actually a TV cabinet. There was a TV, and a bunch of VHS tapes and...oh boy. Hook ups for a missing VCR player. Uh-oh, really, really not good. Sam had apparently stolen from mom and dad...how the heck was I going to explain this?

I checked out mom's dresser, but there was nothing interesting there. Except for a framed drawing Sam had done a _really_ long time ago, like over ten years ago. It was a crude crayon drawing of our first (and only) cat, Mitten. Ha, I remember Sam actually arguing with my parents into not calling her Mittens. She _insisted_ that the cat should be called Mitten. When dad asked why, she'd calmly explained that well, there was only one cat, not two, so it should be Mit- _ten_ , not Mit- _tens_. Well, who could argue with that? It made perfect sense.

I decided to keep going with this and check out the two doors at the back of the room. The first one, on the right, led to a master bathroom. Holy crow! It was pretty big. But, I guess, being the parents, they got first dibs on the bathroom. And it was even two rooms! The first room had sinks and the next room had a toilet and tub. Well, the only thing in there was a book next to the toilet. The cover had a picture of a middle-aged couple sitting on a bench in a field and read: _After the Honeymoon. Rediscovering Your Spouse: Personally, Spiritually, Sexually._

Bleh. I put it back.

It kind of grossed me out, but beneath that, I found myself thinking: _Should I be worried?_ Moms and dads getting divorced was something that all kids feared, especially if you grew up with both of them. Were my parents in trouble? If you'd asked me a year ago, six months ago...hell, if you'd asked me _before this night_ , I'd have said: No way! Of course not! My mom and dad love each other and they will forever!

It sounded so childish, and yet I had believed it.

I still did...to a certain extent. But now I was beginning to wonder. Dad was drinking again, and...he apparently was failing at his job, and had apparently given up on his passion. What if...mom didn't want to put up with that anymore? All the old fights they used to have, I suddenly wondered if maybe mom had just...given up. If the fights had dwindled not out of love, but frustration, and finally apathy?

No...I was being paranoid. I had to be.

I left the bathroom and moved on to the second door, which led to a big, walk-in closet. Just clothes and boxes here...and another board game. Escape From Haunted Mansion. That one had been pretty fun, but it had given me nightmares when I was younger. When I was a _lot_ younger, thank you very much. It'd be ridiculous to get nightmares as an adult from a stupid board game...I put it back quickly, high up on the shelf.

As I stared at the boxes, it suddenly hit me: why did this house still look like my family was moving in? There were boxes _everywhere_ and yet, they had all lived here for over a year. What did that mean? My family wasn't lazy...well, my mom wasn't. She got things done. So why were there still boxes in the corner of my parent's bedroom? Why wasn't it unpacked? My mom would be able to see these every _day_.

Had she given up on some things?

I liked that thought least of all. The idea of my mom just not caring about something anymore chilled me. I decided to check the bed out. The first thing that grabbed my attention was a book peeking out from beneath it. I pulled it out. Leaves of Grass, by Walt Whitman. And there was a bookmark in it.

I almost put it back without thinking about it, but then I caught some writing on the back of the bookmark. Naturally, I checked it out.

 _Take your time. I'm glad to have it in good hands. -Rick_

Who was Rick? Maybe it was all the bad feelings I'd had just now, but I had a sudden aversion to this Rick. Was it intuition? Paranoia? Total crap? I couldn't tell, but I suddenly wanted to know more about this Rick guy. There had to be something around here...I checked mom's nightstand and opened the drawer.

There was a letter here, written in Carol's handwriting.

I started reading.

 _Dear Jan,_

 _Oh honey, let me tell you, I understand  
how you feel. Bob and I have had our  
down periods. It's become a bit of a way of  
life, actually...You get used to each other,  
you live your own lives in the same house,  
the kids grow up, they go away...I'm sorry,  
this isn't helping, is it?! Don't worry. Terry  
will get over whatever's distracting him, things  
will go back to normal, and as for Sam being  
distant? That's a teenager for you. Nothing to  
worry about._

 _In the meantime though, this "controlled burn"-  
that sounds like quite the adventure! But let's  
cut to the chase! This new ranger they sent,  
THAT'S what I want to hear about! "Ranger  
Rick?" You have got to be kidding me! It's too  
perfect. You HAVE to tell me everything...and  
send pictures! I want the whole package! Wait, that  
sounded wrong!_

 _Keep your chin up until Terry is out of his  
slump. And in the meantime, write more letters  
to your old friend Carol! She adores them!_

 _-Carol_

Now I felt worse than before. The way Carol was reacting, it seemed like maybe my mom had been talking up this guy, this...Rick. Obviously the guy that referral form I'd found had been referring to. Maybe I was being paranoid, probably I was. But...something was wrong here. And obviously mom and dad were having problems. There was no denying it now. Dad must be depressed or in some kind of a slump...I didn't blame him.

I put the letter back and continued my search. I wanted information more than ever now. It was kind of like being in purgatory, not knowing if the situation was good or bad. There were no definitive answers yet. Plus, there was still the biggest mystery of: where the hell was everyone!? I found a postcard on dad's nightstand, the one I sent from London. More great memories, but my year in Europe seemed farther away than ever now.

The only place left in the room to check was the drawer of the nightstand before me. I resisted the urge to cross my fingers or silently (and hypocritically) pray as I pulled it open. Well, there was a bible in there. (Still no use.) And...what was this?

It was a little business card.

 _KAZ. Unknown Dimension Literature._

Okay, THIS was new. And it sounded like good news, _great_ news actually. Did this have anything to do with dad's sudden renewal in writing? Had he found a new publishing deal for his shelved third book? It could potentially solve a lot of problems if he had.

Well, it was, maybe, the good news I was hoping for.

I put everything back and, gratefully, left my parent's room.


	11. Chapter 10: Almost A Dead End

Back out in the hallway, I found myself staring at the guest room. Well, I guess I was going to finally see it like Sam wanted. The note she'd written was still there, peeking out from under the door. I approached it and pushed the door open the whole way. Hitting the lights, I found myself looking at a small room packed with boxes. Some of them had my name on them. Well, good to know my stuff was still around here somewhere. I spied an unmade bed, (thanks guys, not even a pillow!), some empty bookshelves, more boxes…

I spied a note on an endtable tucked between the head of the bed and the wall, though it quickly became obvious that it wasn't for me. It was from Lonnie, for Sam. She had drawn up a quick little guide to her ROTC ribbons and what each meant. It was pretty cute. I also found a composition book, you remember the type, the black cover with stern lettering and good binding and white specks all over it. I'd seen a lot of people with them.

Sam had written on the front.

 _SAMANTHA GREENBRIAR  
GHOST HUNTER JOURNAL_

I couldn't help but grin as I read over her entries.

 _Aug 31 1994 – 1:19AM -_

 _A TALL SHADOW in the upstairs hall. When I  
rounded the corner, no one was there. How  
tall was Uncle Oscar? (Note: I was not wearing  
my glasses.)_

 _Sept 3 1994 – 12:44AM -_

 _A faint voice coming from the bottom of  
the stairs. I said "hello." Did not investigate.  
Probably was the furnace._

 _Oct 22 1994 – 11PM – 12AM -_

 _Lonnie and I employ Ouija Board as a  
medium. Disturbed messages are conveyed  
from the other side. Oscar is definitely here!_

 _Oct 28 1994 10PM – Oct 29 4AM -_

 _Enlisted Lonnie to stay up all night and help  
patrol premises, recording any signs of otherworldly  
presence. Lonnie reported many sightings, but all  
remained unconfirmed. Possible ectoplasm in attic  
probably due to leaky roof. Sample taken, just in case.  
Despite our best efforts we both fell asleep around  
4AM. All in all a successful night._

Any other time, I would have laughed at this. Sam was totally into ghosts and aliens and stuff, but me? Well, like I said, I didn't necessarily believe, but I also didn't not believe. But I for sure didn't think that a Ouija Board could communicate with the dead. But reading this now...something creaked, out in the hallway.

I suddenly felt cold all over, swallowed nervously and turned around. I moved slowly but surely back to the door and stared out the doorway, checking both directions. Nothing there. Well, it _was_ an old house, a hundred years old, actually, so naturally it's gotta make a lot of strange noises. Right? All the same, I still felt kind of creeped out. I moved back into the guest room and checked out all that was left: the closet.

But it was just stuffed with more boxes that had my name on it. Jeez, did I really have so much crap? There were over a dozen boxes in this room with my name on them! Continuing my search, I moved on to the last area I actually had access to, at least as far as I could see. An unidentified room right next to the guest room.

Hitting the lights, the first thing I noticed was an easel. It was facing away from me, taking up the center of the room, so I moved around it, snapping on a table lamp, and studied the painting that was there. It was of a vase of yellow flowers that was resting on a table right in front of the painting and it was pretty good, actually. I wondered who had done this. Behind the flowers was a chair with another one of Sam's tapes on it.

I left it well enough alone.

Moving along the edge of the room, I found bookshelves and tables. There was an easy chair tucked into the opposite corner, the one the painting was facing, and there was an endtable next to it. I found a piece of paper on it, one of those official looking pieces of fax paper with perfectly placed bulleted holes all along the sides.

It was a Performance Evaluation of Richard Patermach...by Janice Greenbriar. I frowned as I saw that, next to every single criteria, mom had circled 5 (Exemplary). I remembered clearly thinking not all that long ago, when I found that note about mom performing an evaluation on the guy feeling sorry for him, cause mom had some harsh standards.

This wasn't right.

If I'd read this before the other stuff I'd found in reference to this Rick, I'd think it was weird...but not impossible that this guy was really just that good. But now? The idea hit me as clear as if someone had spoken it aloud in the silent room.

Was my mom cheating on my dad?

The thought of it made me miserable and unhappy and almost ill. No...not mom. But...things hadn't been going well lately. Or maybe just not even lately, but for awhile now, maybe. A long while. I remembered the day planner, remembered the way she'd crossed out Dancing and Bowling. _Couples_ Bowling, specifically.

What if she'd met this guy...this hot, younger guy who might be good in all the ways dad wasn't, and she realized she might be falling for him? So she'd desperately tried to make the relationship she was in work again. Only dad wouldn't have liked that. He'd been content to stay in and work for years now, and suddenly she wants to go bowling and dancing?

Obviously it hadn't worked.

But what if I was making this all up? What if I was just connecting the dots, but I was totally wrong?

Only...no, that didn't feel right. My thoughts on the subject felt right. But the real question was, did mom actually go all the way? Or did she just really like this Rick but she had stayed loyal to dad? I didn't like this, not at all.

I moved on, finding another table positioned between a pair of low bookshelves stuffed with books. The table had a drawer. I opened it and found some pieces of paper there that looked a bit out of place among the other crap that generally gets stuffed into drawers. The first was another generic piece of spiral notebook paper with **HALLOWEEN SHOW!** written over the top and a lot of other stuff written on it too.

But it was the page below it that interested me.

 _Oct. 29, 1994_

" _Lie-to-Mom-and-Dad Situation"_

 _Sometimes you just have to lie to mom and dad. Like  
when Lonnie asked me to see a band with her, and stay  
over at her friend's place in the city after. That's a  
lie-to-mom-and-dad situation._

 _But it was sooo worth it. The girls on stage were just  
so LOUD and REAL and AWESOME, and everybody was  
moving together like one huge tide of sound.  
Between two songs Lonnie leaned over and said "how  
do you like your first show?" I was so happy I felt tears  
starting in my eyes, and then she up and hugged me. I  
think she could tell._

Tell what?

Despite my confusion, I was smiling again. It made me happy that Sam had been so happy. I collected the journal entry and finished my search of the room. Nothing else...but at least there was another door. I moved over to it and opened it up, turning on the light. It looked like just another room, nothing too specific going on here for a theme. There were some boxes, a chair and a sewing table to my right, a big old wardrobe cabinet shoved up into the corner to the left and, behind the door I'd opened, another table and chair.

I poked through the boxes and found something that made me giggle. Then it made me really just start laughing. It was one of those sappy romance novels. There was a generic hot topless guy on the cover, wearing only suspenders and ripped abs. He was holding a fire ax and there was a lot of forest behind him.

It was called _Wildfire_.

The byline read: _He saved her from the raging flames...and then things really heated up!_

Oh man! That was too much! I put it back, laughing even harder, laughing until there were tears in my eyes. I'd never been able to get into romance novels like my mom did. They were just so cheesy and sappy, with ridiculous dialogue and overly happy, perfect endings. Getting myself back under control, I kept looking around.

I moved over to the old wardrobe. It kind of gave me the creeps, but when I opened it up, I couldn't help but crack a huge smile. There was an old-timey, fancy dress and what looked like a witch's hat taking up most of the space, but as I studied a piece of drawing paper that was tacked to the inside of the door, I realized what it was.

Lonnie had drawn Captain Allegra and the First Mate...and they were planning on dressing up like them! It was so freaking cute...and awesome, too. Sam would be Captain Allegra and Lonnie would be her First Mate. And I gotta say, the high seas outfits were totally badass. Sam would've looked great in this get-up.

I turned around and stared at the foldout table behind the door. I realized that this was it, this was the last thing I had to look at, unless I wanted to go back and start looking all over again for that damned missing key. There was an empty yellow cup, a pen, a generic _Healthy Choices_ textbook from school with an Olympic woman doing an incredible jump, and a folder. I flipped it open...and hesitated. Okay, wow, jackpot.

There was a paper with a crude drawing of a map on it that I realized was our house...and it showed a hallway that I sure hadn't seen.

 _LONNIE! Holy crap I was in the  
library and I noticed something in the  
corner and I found a SECRET  
PASSAGE and it had Oscar's creepy old stuff in it?_

 _Oh my god. I have to see this.  
We're skipping 6_ _th_ _._

A secret passage...I realized, studying the map, that this apparent hallway started at the back of mom and dad's closet. What? I don't remember seeing anything. But this was my only lead. Ha, lead. Like I'm a detective or something.

With this in mind, I headed back to mom and dad's room.


	12. Chapter 11: Secrets

Hurrying back through the house, I got to the closet in question.

The back wall looked...like a back wall. I remembered seeing people in movies knock on the wall, listening for a hollow space, so I did just that. It only took about two seconds to notice a difference. Okay...definitely a hollow space back there. But how to open it? I pushed against a section of the wall and something clicked.

It popped open.

No way…

I continued pushing it in and found myself staring down a dark stairwell. The light from the closet was good enough to see that the walls, which were not normal walls, but unfinished walls, were papered with old newspaper clippings. Majorly creepy, like a serial killer's house or something. Well, no guts, no glory, that's what it was, right?

I stepped into the stairwell and made my way slowly down. I didn't like the way there were cobwebs in the corners, or how the light quickly began to fade. As I reached the bottom, I found a drawstring and pulled it. I sighed softly as light flooded the area, then felt even more comfortable as I saw a note from Sam and a photograph tacked up to the wall immediately in front of me. I studied them both.

The photo showed one of the wall panels pulled off and a little space inside. Huh! I flashed back to thinking of how I compared searching the house to playing Doom...well, what the hell! I guess I _should_ have been looking for secret panels!

There was another drawing with a total of three 'secret panels' marked out. One in the library, which should be right on the other side of this wall, one in the hallway just off the left side of the entryway, what Sam called the foyer, and one next to Sam's bathroom. Well, tonight just got a whole lot more interesting.

I began to head towards the exit, it was another door-sized wall panel and I could actually see light coming in through some of the cracks, when I noticed a small wooden cross placed on an unfinished section of wall. It had writing on it. I reached down and picked it up, but the second my fingers touched it, the light went out.

I let out a small cry of fear, my body going cold, heart in my throat as I was plunged into darkness. Without really thinking about it, I rushed over to the door-panel and shoved it open. It gave with ease and I spilled out onto the floor. Grunting as I hit the floor, I rolled over, looking to see behind me, half-expecting a ghostly figure to be lingering in the doorway...but there was nothing, and I realized how silly I was being.

And now I had banged up knees to go with it.

I groaned quietly as I got back to my feet, then I pushed the wall panel closed. It made enough sense to, I guess, but really I just didn't like the thought of it being open. Looking around, I realized I was back in dad's library, the one just off his office. I moved over to the corner where Sam claimed there was a false panel and, sure enough, with a bit of prying, the panel in question popped right off. Holy smokes!

There were two pieces of paper in there.

One was a promo flyer from the show Sam and Lonnie had gone to, and another journal entry from my one and only little sister.

 _Oct. 29, 1994_

" _Adjusting to the Dark"_

 _At Todd's brother's place after the show, there was  
only a futon to sleep on, so Lonnie and I shared it. The  
lights went out...I was turned toward her...my eyes  
started to adjust, and then I could see she was looking  
at me, too. In the dark, she smiled._

 _My heart was beating so fast. I rolled over, I felt so...I  
don't know, nervous? After a minute she put her arm  
around me, and was so close, and whispered in my ear,  
_" _I really like you." I just nodded my head and I really  
hope she could tell. I really hope...that she meant what  
I think she did._

 _I've felt like a shook-up can of soda inside ever since. I  
hope we have a chance to talk before I explode._

Suddenly, a lot of things made sense. I thought about it as I walked back through the house, towards the next secret panel right next to the foyer. Sam...must like Lonnie. As in...like like. I should have seen it sooner.

Figuring out that Sam liked girls instead of boys was something that didn't happen all at once. It's kind of hard to describe, but there was no revelation on my part, no 'ah-ha!' moment. I'd just kind of...pieced it together over the years. And we hadn't ever talked about it, either. I'm not sure why. I wouldn't have judged her, you like who you like, and that's your business, and no one else's. And I'm sure she knew that I wouldn't have judged her. And we talk about everything. Only maybe this _was_ her way of talking about it?

I found another group of stapled together papers in there, as well as a small slip of paper. The first article turned out to be another short story about Captain Allegra and her First Mate. Huh, according to the date stamp, this was written a couple years ago, when Sam was in ninth grade. Maybe not so recent after all...unless the one I found upstairs in her closet was more recent. That one didn't have a date on it that I remember.

I smiled at the **PRIVATE! DO NOT READ** scrawled across the front and began flipping through it. I knew she might be embarrassed if I read it, but I don't think she'd actually mind. As I read over it, and especially got to the end, my SamxLonnie theory felt even more true. Captain Allegra claimed the First Mate as the love of her life, and it was clear that Lonnie wanted to be Sam's First Mate. It suddenly hit me…

Had Sam run away with Lonnie?

It seemed possible, likely even, but I needed more information. And the little slip of paper was, I realized, half of a locker combination...just perfect for the locker in Sam's room. But where was the rest? Well, I had one more secret panel to check out.

I hurried back upstairs, feeling like I was finally making progress, real progress! I got to the third panel, pulled it off, and looked at my latest treasure. Well, there was the Ouija Board, plus a pen, a piece of paper and...bingo.

The second half of Sam's locker combo.

0501.

I looked over the paper.

 _1\. Hello?_

 _HELLO  
_

 _2\. Who are you?_

 _OSCAR  
_

 _3\. What do you want?_

 _TOCOMEBA  
_

I stood up, not wanting to think about ghosts anymore, not after the fright I'd had in the secret passageway. I turned right around and marched back into Sam's room, right up to her locker. Putting in the combo gave me flashbacks to high school. Ugh, _so_ glad to be done with that crap. Jackpot again! The locker swung open.

The first thing that leaped out at me was, taped to the inside of the door, a picture of Lonnie two point oh. As in, Lonnie with red hair. She looked great with it and the smile she was giving the camera seemed to be real, genuine, not that 'Okay, smile and say cheese for the family photo' crap your family always put you through.

Sam must have been taking the picture.

Right next to the picture hung a key. A little keyring attached to it read: _basement_. Yes! Even more progress! Though, I have to admit, I did _not_ relish going down to a basement in the middle of the night during a thunderstorm. Well, hopefully it was a finished basement. Unfinished basements are creepy enough by themselves. I found a few other things. There was an empty pack of cigarettes on the top shelf of the locker...oh, come on, Sam. I try not to judge but picking up an addictive, unhealthy habit just seems dumb.

Then I found another girlie magazine at the bottom. It was a little funny. Around the sexy woman posing in lingerie were things like: _The Great U.F.O. Cover-Up_ and _Special: Shannen Doherty_ and _Finally: Gillian Anderson!_ I ignored the magazine when I found another journal entry from Sam. I sat on her bed and read it over after pocketing the basement key.

 _Nov. 1, 1994_

" _There Was Nothing Wrong"_

 _Lonnie came over today. But everything was…  
different. She was sitting at my desk chair. And she  
wouldn't look at me._

 _Finally I asked her what was going on. She said she felt  
like she'd done something wrong that night in the city,  
like I must think…_

 _But I said no, there was nothing wrong, I just wanted to  
say…_

 _But I couldn't find the words. I felt like I was going to  
cry, but I wasn't sad. She got up and sat next to me on  
the bed. I looked at her.  
_" _Lonnie...do you...think...you could ever..."  
...And that's when she kissed me._

It was hard not to be happy for Sam, not to smile as I tucked the journal into my pocket. Man, I was building quite a collection. Sam had finally found someone! I remember worrying last year over the fact that she had never found anyone to be, you know, intimate with. As I shut the locker and started making my way back to the basement, (I stopped to try the key in the attic door and the other locked door off the foyer, but no luck there), I ruminated on my own experiences, my own brushes with the opposite sex.

I'd lost my virginity at sixteen, in the summer between tenth and elven grade. It had been...well, it had been a lot of things. At the time, me and Zach had been dating for almost a whole year. It seemed like a lifetime. He wanted to go all the way and mom and dad and Sam were out and he had a condom so I figured...well, why not?

I probably would have kept doing it but he got weird after that. Like, I dunno, all of the sudden he was like jealous all the time, and really paranoid that I was seeing other guys. He hadn't been like that before. He was really possessive of me. After that, he always had to hold my hand or have his arm around me, which I didn't mind...except that it had changed. It had gone from something sweet to being more like him saying, 'She's _mine_ , she's _my_ property and you can't have her'. Or sometimes almost like he was...displaying me, maybe?

It just felt really weird and I ended up breaking up with him a few months later. After that, I didn't bother with boyfriends or sex for the rest of high school. I had a boyfriend again during the first year of college, and that had been fun, and there'd been more sex, and it had been nice. But then he ended up getting kicked out for missing too many classes. He tried to get me to come with him, back to his home state, he lived in Florida, but there was no way that was happening. And so he left. Then, over this last year…

Well, let's just say that I haven't bothered with boyfriends, but I didn't really say no to the sex every once in awhile when it was on offer.

Okay, here I was. The basement.

I put in the key and turned it.


	13. Chapter 12: The Basement - Part One

The area beyond the door didn't look like a basement at all.

I'd expected something like a stairwell descending into the yawning darkness. But it was just more of the same, like the hallway I was standing in. More hardwood floors, white walls. No light, though, and no switch. Sighing, I stepped into the little area. It extended to the right a bit, then turned left and _there_ was the stairwell descending into the yawning darkness. An anti-climax, I guess. In the faded light from behind me, I could even make out more cobwebs, gathered in the corner. Ugh, I hated spiders. I hoped there were none around.

The stairs creaked underneath my feet as I descended the stairwell. I found a drawstring at the small, square landing and pulled it. Merciful light. The walls had an unfinished look to them. Wonderful, I had more stairs to conquer…and an entire basement, too. Well, no guts, no glory. I went down the next stairway.

Through a tiny, closet-sized room and finally I came into the actual basement. Well...this wasn't so bad. Although the floor was bare concrete, the walls were finished and there was proper lighting, or there would be once I turned it on, and a lot of stuff was down here too. It didn't have the feel that other basements did. Although it was sure crammed with a lot of stuff. There was a couch beneath a sheet and some boxes ahead of me, more boxes and a dresser to the left and, surprise!, even more boxes over to the right.

Well, where to start?

There was some evidence of Sam hanging out down here over to the left. A little round table was shoved up in front of the dresser and I found a half-eaten bag of potato chips on the floor, (at least she'd remembered to use the clip this time to keep it closed), another can of soda, Fizz Rite Ginger Ale, and a big, bulky 3-ring binder that was empty but had some papers peeking out from beneath it. Moving the binder aside, I saw that the papers were from Lonnie, to Sam, and another back to Lonnie from Sam. I couldn't help but laugh as I read them.

Basically, Lonnie was thanking Sam for having her over for Thanksgiving, (and making fun of my dad a little, but she was right, he was so awkward around new people), and then apparently Sam went over to Lonnie's for another Thanksgiving. They'd written it all fancy like, with ridiculous dialogue and Sam had even signed it:

 _Indeed,_

 _Madame Samantha Greenbriar, Esq._

I put them back where they'd been and kept searching. Even this couldn't fully evaporate the awkward fear that was sitting somewhere deep inside me. I kept waiting for something to leap out at me and the occasional rumble of thunder didn't help, either, nor the fact that it was the middle of the night. My next break came only a few feet away. I found a little drawing, a very good one that made me feel warm and happy for Sam. It was a stylized L + S inside of a heart that was also a flower. Man, Lonnie was _good_ at drawing.

They were quite a pair.

There was another journal entry, a note from my little sister to me, waiting beneath the wonderful piece of art.

 _Dec. 8, 1994_

" _It's Different Now"_

 _It's different now. I mean, we still hang out all the time  
like before. But now when nobody else is around…  
well, you know. So you COULD say we're dating. But it's  
secret. Secret dating? I don't know. I mean I guess  
that's the real difference: now, when we get off the  
phone, or go home for the night...or it's just quiet and  
we're alone...we say "I love you."_

"Sam..." I whispered, smiling, feeling something awkward in my throat and tears burning in my eyes, threatening to fall. I wasn't ready to cry, not yet, so I wiped them away and carefully pocketed the journal entry. My little sister was in love. If anyone deserved love and happiness, it was Sam. She'd been through a lot it seemed, and everything was so hard for her...and sometimes it didn't seem fair, because everything seemed so easy for me by comparison. And I knew that she thought that, too. I was so grateful that she never held it against me.

As I began to make my way to the other side of the room, which was just darkness and a lot more boxes, I saw something weird. It made me really nervous at first as I stared at it, trying to figure out what the heck it was. Light was playing on the wall, slowly and subtly shifting. A sullen orange-red kind of light. A candle? No…

What _was_ it?

Cautiously, I moved forward, around a big stack of boxes, until finally I could see what was casting that eerie light. It was a furnace! I've never been so relieved by a freaking furnace. But then I remembered that movie Home Alone and how scared that kid was of _his_ furnace and I was all uncomfortable again.

Sighing in frustration, I moved on, pulling another drawstring and lighting up the area. Man, we had a _lot_ of boxes! I saw that some of my stuff had ended up down here, too. I wondered how much of this stuff was Oscar's. I mean, some of it had to be, we didn't have _this_ much stuff. I moved back around another big stack of boxes, seeing that there was a space between the boxes and the walls. Well, I found more of my stuff.

There was an open box and a bunch of papers stacked up. Old assignments. I don't know why I'd kept these. Maybe it felt like keeping what you kill, those assignments were often a pain. The top one was, oddly enough, the exact same sex ed assignment I'd seen earlier that had no doubt gotten Sam into a lot of trouble. My answer was a lot more bland: it was exactly what they wanted. I'd gotten an A+ on the thing.

Nothing else here. I moved on into the furnace room.

More like the utilities room. Here was the furnace, the fusebox, and the water heater. Off to the left was a whole other area. I moved in between tables stacked on top of each other and even more boxes, enough boxes to fill a warehouse, it seemed, and managed to find light in the form of a floor lamp leaning far to its side against a pile of stuff. It was plugged in, however, the plug pushed up into a socket in the ceiling.

The first thing I found blew my mind...the second thing I found made me want to cry again.

The first was a letter from that pre-college Creative Writing thing I'd seen a brochure for back up in Sam's bedroom. She had gotten in! And, holy crap, they were going to cover 75% of the costs based on her portfolio!

Then I found another journal.

 _Jan. 12, 1995_

" _Ship Date"_

 _I'm so stupid sometimes._

 _I was telling Lonnie that I got into my college summer  
program thing, and I was all making plans like, you  
should come visit me! Stay in my dorm room! But she  
said, "Sam...I ship out on June 6_ _th_ _." And I was like...ship  
out? To where? She said, "to Basic Training! What did  
you think I was doing all that ROTC stuff for?" I guess  
she's been planning to join the army right after high  
school since she was like, 12. And I guess she's really  
going to do it._

 _So I was like, "after graduation, I'm just...never going  
to see you again?"_

 _She said, "let's just have fun while we can."_

Oh God...it sucked going from feeling so happy to so sad. I can't even imagine what Sam must have felt like when she'd written this, when she'd gotten this news. It made me wonder if Lonnie was keeping it from her...or if Sam just was blind to it. Probably a little of both. After collecting the journal, I kept looking, moving through the crazy maze of boxes and junk, trying to keep my spirits up. But one thing caught on me.

June Sixth.

That was yesterday. One more piece to the puzzle. Had Sam just...left, with Lonnie? Or had she just left period? Then there was that message...still not enough, though. I needed more information. And, at least on that end, I felt good. Sam had left a trail of breadcrumbs for me all over the house, I was confident she had left enough for me to find out the truth. But, unfortunately, I didn't like the fact that I kept stumbling over unhappy factoids.

Dad's failed career.

Mom's potential affair.

Well...I guess that was the price I was paying for wanting to know the truth. I was going to damn well learn the truth...all of it.

I kept looking and found a few more interesting things. There was a piece of a magazine paper torn out. It was an ad for a two-piece locket in the shape of a heart, obviously meant for couples. Someone, Lonnie or Sam, had written **L + S** and circled the locket. Then I found one of granddad's books. I knew he wrote stuff that I truly had no interest in and yep, here was a great example. Joyce: A Complete Understanding, by Richard Greenbriar, Ph.D.

Jeez, did he mean _James_ Joyce?!

I'd tried reading Finnegan's Wake once in high school and it gave me a headache. I couldn't imagine actually reading, let alone _understanding_ the whole thing. When I turned around...that's when I found something creepy. Like, really creepy. There was a framed painting leaned up against the same stack of junk the lamp was leaned up against. At first I wasn't sure what it was I was looking at...then I saw that it was a painting of a man in a business suit. Someone had cut out the head and it was nowhere to be found.

I wondered who it was...then I saw a nameplate at the bottom.

 _Richard Greenbriar, Ph.D  
Profession Laureate of English  
University of Oregon, 1956_

Holy crap...dad had done this. He _had_ to have done this. I couldn't imagine Sam or mom doing it, or anyone else for that matter. Suddenly, I was a lot more worried about dad. This was serious. I could imagine him doing this in a drunken stupor, but...no, I realized suddenly, the cuts were too clean for that. He'd done this sober. I knew, at least vaguely, (now more than ever), that dad kind of lived in granddad's shadow.

I mean, the guy was a renowned professor with actual, serious books published. And dad was a failed sci-fi writer who was settling into middle age and wrote reviews for new pieces of technology. Not really a legacy. But this...something had to have happened. But what? I found my answer only about eight feet away.

There was another copy of dad's first book sitting on a tiny round table, very close to the floor. I saw a piece of paper peeking out from beneath it and flipped it over. That's where I found my answer, in cold, lifeless black type, taped to the back of the book.

 _Dear Terrance,_

 _Thank you for sending along a copy of your newly  
published book. An author's first published manuscript  
is a momentous occasion. I read it this afternoon.  
I certainly recognize my son in the subject  
matter. An author's work is the externalization of  
that which he holds dear, (and that which he fears),  
and in this respect I believe that your work has succeeded._

 _But the lens through which the personal shone was  
needlessly clouded by genre cliches and implausible  
dimestore science-fictional dei ex machina. The great  
authors speak of their life's milieu in clear and  
honest tones, the lens crystal that refracts their  
thoughts without distortion._

 _I congratulate you on surviving the great ordeal  
that is publication, and rest assured that readers of  
your chosen genre will lap up copies hungrily. But I  
urge you to shed artifice._

 _You can do better._

 _With a father's love and encouragement,  
Richard Greenbriar, Ph.D_

Well...shit. How long had he had this thing? It was referring to his first publication, so almost two decades. Fighting past the frustration and yet reluctant understanding of granddad's words, (although originally I thought dad's book was, while I didn't understand it, fantastically written, I later realized, as I read other, better works, that his writing was actually kind of cheap. I obviously never told him), I wondered what had set him off recently...or had he done this awhile ago and, for some reason, kept the painting around?

Not knowing what to do with this, feeling at odds with myself, I put the book back where'd I'd found it and came over to a folder with more papers in it. Checking out of habit at this point, I just found mom's citizenship stuff. I'm actually half-Canadian...if that actually means anything. So is Sam. Mom's from the Great White North.

As I tried to make my next decision, I found myself faced with a less obvious choice of where to go next. There was a door ahead of me and one to the right. The door to the right had a light on...so naturally that's where I went.


	14. Chapter 13: The Basement - Part Two

Opening the door, it felt like I was walking back into the '50s.

The room I found myself in almost looked like a tiny apartment. There was a bed area that was actually built into the wall ahead of me and to the left a really old sink that probably didn't work anymore. Above the sink was a glass-fronted medicine cabinet. The door was open. I walked over, reached out, and swung it closed. I began to turn away when it slowly, silently began to fall open again. Frowning, I pushed it closed, more firmly this time.

Same thing, it fell back open.

I sighed. Whatever. I turned away, looking around, and my eyes fell on a jacket, Sam's jacket, abandoned in the corner on the floor next to an abandoned cassette. I found a piece of folded up paper in the jacket and checked it out. At once, I realized what it was: a form letter from a jewelry store. Sam and Lonnie had actually bought it! Or maybe just Sam...it seemed like a nice present. And whoa, it cost eighty bucks!

How long did it take her to save up for that?

She'd even had it specially engraved, which attributed to the extra high price. I smiled reading the line _Custom Engraving "L+S"_.

I glanced over and saw a doorless entryway that led to a very dark area. Next to it was what looked like a place where you hang your keys at the end of the day, but instead it had several bells hanging from it. I frowned, studying it. Each bell was labeled something. Library. Kitchen. Front Door. Mr. Masan's Rm. Maybe these were like servant's quarters or something? I flicked one bell, then another. They sounded different.

Oh!

Whoever's job it was to take care of the house and the people in it had to learn the sounds of the different bells and memorize which sound correlated to which area of the house. Huh, that was a neat idea, even if the idea of a servant, even a paid one, made me kind of uncomfortable. But I guess it was a 'different time', as mom would say. I left the dark area well enough alone for now and instead moved over to the empty bed space.

I found a letter from Lonnie near another abandoned can of Ginger Ale. Apparently she'd been visiting family in Mexico and they were writing back and forth to each other. I wondered how long ago this was, there was no date. There was also another button on the floor that said X-ray Spex. I almost moved on when I noticed another piece of paper hidden both behind a wastebasket and half underneath the table in front of me.

Another journal?

Retrieving it, I thought it might be, but it looked a little odd.

 _It's like a drug…  
The first time was in my room in the middle of the night.  
I woke up and Lonnie was kissing me_

Okay no, not reading any more of that. I put it back. I mean, hey, go Sam, but I really don't want any of the details. Looking around the room one more time, trying to get my mind off of...that, I found a yellow piece of paper taped to the wall with electrical tape and another journal entry stuck to the wall behind it.

The top paper was a list of bands, a setlist for a show, it looked like. The journal entry was, much to my relief, another one meant for me.

 _Feb. 11, 1995_

" _I Can Sing"_

 _Todd's band lost their singer- Todd says he sucked,  
Lonnie says he got sick of Todd's shit- and he was  
complaining about needing a new singer, so Lonnie  
was like, "I can sing!" We were all kind of like, "you  
can?" And she was like, "probably!"_

 _But she's been rehearsing with them for like a week  
now, and I finally got to see them play in Todd's  
basement today, and she's actually...really...amazing.  
I feel so...PROUD, when she's on stage. It's incredible  
being in awe of someone you love._

 _So everybody knows it's like, a temporary situation, til  
she ships out in June. But til then...I'm going to be at  
every single show._

Well that made me feel a lot better! It was dated about a month after her Ship Date journal entry and this one sounded way more optimistic. Which was good, because now it was time to face down that really, really dark area. Standing at the threshold, I briefly considered leaving it be. But...no, I needed to search the whole house. I mean, I'd already come this far, combed over all those rooms, I could leave no stone unturned.

So I walked into the darkness, down a short hallway. There was, at least, a drawstring. Yanking on it lit the place up. The hallway I was in continued along to my right. It also held a safe, a very old map of the first floor of the house, and something I almost missed. I knelt down in front of the safe first. It looked pretty old, too, and it was locked up tight. I frowned, staring at the spin-combo wheel, but I had no idea what to put in.

Sighing, I stood up and stared at the map for a few seconds. No help there. Turning around, staring into another yawning pit of darkness, something caught my eye to the right. On one of the support beams of the wall, there were markings in a column. I quickly recognized them for what they were. They were the kind of markings you made when you were charting someone growing up. And, apparently, it was my dad.

I saw Terry Age 6 1957 on the bottom and Terry Age 12 Thanksgiving 1963. For a moment, I smiled, remembering doing something similar with my dad...but then I frowned. Looking around, I thought it was really weird that they had come all the way down here to do this. I mean, this is really, really far out of the way. Why not somewhere upstairs? Or closer in? Why here specifically? This was a creepy place to be, suddenly that much creepier...I remembered my thoughts about something maybe happening between dad and his uncle Oscar.

No, I didn't want to think about that, not here, not now.

Knowing I'd have to get it over with, I turned and walked down the rest of the way. At the end of the hall was a closed door. I opened it. The rusty hinges creaking made me jump, and it made my heart leap into my throat. Inside, I could just make out a very small room, the back of which was boarded up and there was a lot of old firewood stacked against it. I reached up, yanking on the drawstring, but it wouldn't work.

I was left in darkness.

Standing there quickly became unbearable and I turned around, again half-expecting to see a drooling psychopath or that guy in the hockey mask with the machete standing behind me, waiting for that exact perfect moment to strike. But there was still nothing there. I retreated back out into the servant room and was going to head on deeper into the basement, but then I stopped at the threshold, a thought suddenly rising in my mind.

I turned around and walked back into the dark hallway and up to the safe. Those numbers on the wall, the years...they were four numbers long. I tried the earliest year first, but it was no luck. Then I tried the top year, 1963...the safe clicked open. Unlike the other times I'd gotten into things, I was a little reluctant to look inside.

Most of the stuff that was in there was really old, dusty medical stuff. Several differently shaped bottles, some little boxes, a syringe...and a piece of paper. A letter, actually. It was to Mary Greenbriar, my grandma, from Oscar. Although apparently grandma hadn't even bothered to open it. Instead, she'd crossed the front out and written in angry, red lettering _Return to Sender_. Frowning, not really wanting to but knowing I had to, I opened up the envelope and pulled out the letter that waited for me inside. I began reading.

 _Dear sister,_

 _I write what shall be my last appeal  
to go unanswered, one way or the other.  
I feel a prisoner, on an island, with no jailor, no  
human soul for commune- only my one mind, examining  
itself, endlessly, endlessly, searching for relief._

 _In the years since transgression I have sought no  
absolution, only bare forgiveness. In good faith I have  
removed myself from all temptation, sacrificed to  
prove my commitment however I can imagine._

 _Since Mother's passing I have yearned for nothing  
more than the acknowledgment of my own kin, to be  
treated as human again, to breathe the air of human  
spirit once more. By grace even a wretch like me could  
be saved, but I do not expect it. If no response is  
received, I shall henceforth accept my sentence, and  
one day simply cease to be._

 _With a brother's love always,  
Oscar Masan_

What...happened? I sat there for awhile, staring at the note, trying to figure it out. He had to be talking about dad. Something had happened back in '63. Thanksgiving '63. But _what_? Did I want to know? Did I really want to know? I put the paper back in the envelope and sealed the safe again. I'm not sure I did. Anyway, there was nothing else in the safe that might provide a clue. My head working furiously, debating about whether or not I wanted to know what, if anything, Oscar had done to my father, I moved on.

This next room, beyond the door I hadn't gone through, was filled with stacks of newspapers piled high. God, what a fire hazard! I noticed something odd about a bookshelf shoved into the far corner, but what really drew my attention was a postcard and what looked to be another journal beneath it. I grabbed them both.

The postcard had a picture of a huge waterfall on the front and writing on the back.

 _Hey Sam,_

 _I'm writing to you from Multnomah Falls! I'm here  
on a stupid class trip which is stupid because it's  
March and I don't know if anyone running this  
school has been to Oregon but it's cold and rainy as  
shit in March._

 _Wish you were here! OH WAIT YOU ARE HERE  
because I'm writing this to you in the gift shop oh  
shit here you come_

 _-L_

I smirked at the silliness of it, but then lost the smirk as I read the next part.

 _Mar. 11, 1995_

" _Stick With The Group"_

 _They tell you to stick with the group on field trips,  
Katie. There's a reason for that._

 _Lonnie and I snuck off on the side paths at Multnomah  
Falls and got a little lost. Okay, a lot lost. Like, for  
hours._

 _But like RIGHT before the bus left, we found a trail, and  
came running down the path, soaked and covered in  
mud, shouting for the bus not to leave…_

 _The school called home...mom & dad said "you didn't  
get into trouble like this BEFORE you met that Lonnie  
girl..." but I don't think they KNOW-know. About us._

 _The kids at school though...I'm really afraid that's a  
whole other story._

 _Stick with the group, Katie. Stick with the group._

Oh boy. I'm not sure through what lens mom and dad were looking, but Sam totally got into trouble like this before Lonnie. Like...all the time. Sam was one of those people who just had to do it her own way, she _had_ to go wandering off the beaten path. Sometimes, you'll find something awesome, but sometimes you'll just piss a lot of people off and have nothing to show for it. The reason she kept doing it, obviously, was that there was no way to tell beforehand which was which. So she did it and, I imagine, kept hoping for awesome.

Well, hey, she'd met Lonnie.

 _Now_ I could look at that strange bookshelf. It had been pulled away from the wall at a weird angle for some reason, not like how you'd normally do it. For one, the farthest side of the shelf, closest to the corner, had been pulled out, not the easier one. I moved around it and...yep, it had been concealing another secret area.

It was a long hallway leading to a stairway, going up. And there was a light on. Obviously Sam had been hanging out here.

Well, at least I was going to get out of the basement.


	15. Chapter 14: Making Progress

The stairs led me up to a bunch of white brick.

There was no door at the top, so I stepped through and looked around. A room that almost looked like a backstage area was off to the right, and there was another doorless doorway to the left that seemed as though it led to another one of those 'behind-the-scenes', unfinished sections hidden behind the walls of my new house. I decided to leave it alone for now and opted to go right, since there was light and stuff over there.

The first thing I noticed was a little endtable immediately to my right that was home to some scraps of paper and one of those green glass-covered lamps. It was still on. I checked out the papers and found that they seemed to be rough drafts of some of the journals Sam had written me. Well, nothing new there. Getting out of the basement had renewed my appetite for information. Well, that and not wanting to think about what might have gone down between my father and Oscar decades and decades ago in this very house.

Dead ahead was another table with a knocked over, turned on table lamp, the kind with the bendy neck, that was pointed at the wall, another cork-board, and a box with the top off. There was a comic on the table. I checked out the table, righting the lamp and then flipping through the comic book I'd found. It was definitely the kind of thing Sam would be into. It was called **Women Outlaws** and featured a badass babe kicking ass and taking names.

Definitely a Sam comic.

The cork-board had some drawings pinned to it, a little pin that said _Wipers_ on it and strips of paper that had _HAD_ _ENOUGH?_ written on them. I didn't know what they meant until I checked out the box, which was packed with what looked like magazines. But when I picked one of them up and began to study it, I thought these magazines were of pretty shoddy quality...and then it hit me. Sam and Lonnie had made these!

The title was GRRRL JUSTICE NOW and featured KICKING AGAINST THE PATRIARCHY and THE GREAT GOODFELLOW RIOT OF '95 on the cover. The back had a kickass drawing of Captain Allegra and the First Mate. I couldn't believe there were so many of these. The box was packed with them. How much time had the pair invested in this project?! I marveled over it for a bit longer, then turned around to the final table in the room. Moving over to it, I pulled on a drawstring in passing, turning on an overhead light.

This table had an empty pizza box, a vacant tape player, some office supplies and...two pieces of paper on it. The first was a sternly-worded letter to Sam directly from the freaking principle. Basically, it was a response to a letter Sam must have written her about Lonnie. I slowly pieced it together. It sounded like someone had written something on Sam's locker...and Lonnie had written on her _own_ locker as well in retaliation, and she was being punished for it. Thus prompting Sam to write the letter, trying to get Lonnie off the hook.

The principle pretty much said that Lonnie was in trouble for defacing her own locker and no one else was in trouble for defacing Sam's locker because they hadn't found the one who'd done it and she should let the matter drop.

For a moment, I didn't get it.

Why would Lonnie write something on her own locker in retaliation for something someone wrote on Sam's locker…

Then, suddenly, I figured it out.

Word must have been going around that Sam and Lonnie were more than just good friends. If someone had written something like _Lesbian_ on Sam's locker, then it would make sense that Lonnie would angrily write the same thing on her own locker...throwing her lot in with Sam's and proudly declaring that _'yeah, we're lesbians...SO WHAT?!'_ Jeez that took guts. I wouldn't be able to do it. I set the letter down and turned to the next paper.

Another journal.

 _Apr. 10, 1995_

" _Getting Lonnie"_

 _I don't "get" Lonnie sometimes._

 _Like, her band and our zine and her hair and  
everything are all "anti-authority," but I watch her in  
JROTC and she's doing drills in perfect formation,  
following orders, no question. And there's all the stuff  
in the news about Don't Ask Don't Tell. Like, she's  
going to join the Army and then have to...LIE? About  
who she IS? She said, "they don't need to know what  
they don't need to know." Like it was no big deal. This  
from the girl who trashed her locker to like, defend my  
honor…_

 _I've learned when to stop arguing though. I don't think  
Lonnie even "gets" Lonnie sometimes._

Well, that just provided more evidence for my theory. I pocketed the journal and then considered what to do next. There was still that doorway I'd discounted earlier...but there was also another tunnel directly to my left. I decided to backtrack first and see where that led. Heading into another unfinished section of tunnel, I followed a set of stairs up, turning on another light in passing and found a door with a little black lever next to it at the top. Cautiously, I pulled on the lever. The 'door' slowly slid open, revealing…

The guest bedroom?

Ugh...no. No! How could I ever sleep in this freaking room knowing that there was a secret panel that let out literally directly across from the bed?!

Sighing, I flipped the lever back, closing the panel, turned around and retreated back to the previous room. Now I moved down the unfinished hallway and pushed open the panel-door at the end. This one led to...I don't know where. I didn't recognize it and it was dark. There was a slightly raised area directly ahead of me, paneled in windows that featured nothing more than rain, darkness, and trees. I was obviously in a hallway.

Feeling nervous, I quickly looked around and located a light-button. Pushing it, the hallway lit up, including a wall-mounted light on the panel I'd just opened. To my right was a door. I put off checking out the raised area dead ahead for the moment, moved over to it and opened it up, having to unlock it first. Suddenly, I knew exactly where I was. I looked into the foyer at the huge stairwell that led to the second story. That locked door, the very first one I'd encountered...this was it. Well...great! The basement was out of the way and I'd unlocked another door. I moved back to the slightly raised area and flicked on a little lamp.

There was just room for a two-seater couch and a table. The couch wasn't hiding anything...or so I thought at first. Almost as I began to move for the table, I stopped as a slip of paper grabbed my attention. It was peeking out from beneath the couch, almost totally hidden. I crouched, snagged it and stood back up.

It was a receipt from something called Salon Josephine. My mom had gone there and spent a hund- _A HUNDRED AND NINETEEN DOLLARS_ on...a shampoo, set, color, perm and manicure. What the heck was this?! The receipt sent a deep ripple of discomfort through my whole body, like I'd found something dirty or scary. I stared at it for a moment longer. Something about this just...nagged me, but I couldn't figure out what.

Then I had it.

Mom didn't really do the whole 'beauty ritual' thing. Like...ever. She was pretty naturally beautiful and never really bothered even with makeup.

So this? This was like, a warning sign. A red flag.

Who had she gotten this done for?

I thought I knew.

Sighing, I put it into my pocket for further examination later and moved on to the table. I found a Spanish textbook, a bunch of piled up papers that amounted to nothing interesting, a professional-looking piece of paper that was a letter to my mom, officially requesting that she transfer to a managerial position, and a folder with a note in it. I frowned as I read it.

 _Hey Lonnie, sorry my mom was such a bitch last night.  
She's hardly ever around since her forest is like an  
hour away and then when she is home she takes it out  
on you, like because you're not a member of the family  
she knows you won't call her on it, and I'm sorry._

 _Ha ha, it's okay, I know she's just jealous of our cool  
and freewheeling lifestyles. I feel sorry for YOU—I'm  
lucky, my mom lives in Florida. You have to have a  
mom EVERY DAY_

 _Sorry, I didn't mean to bring up the mom thing like  
that. I know, I shouldn't complain._

 _No I'm being totally serious. My mom is a psycho  
Christian and her new husband ("DON") is a complete  
tool. Living in Florida with him is her eternal  
punishment in my mind._

 _So you wouldn't rather live with your mom in Florida?_

The next page had a huge NO on it, the O turned into a face with x'ed out eyes and daggers falling from the sky. Ha. But I couldn't keep up my smile for more than a few seconds. Mom was normally pretty well composed...and it was almost alien to think of her yelling at a visitor. Like...that just wasn't done. It was so rude. Things only got worse as, out of some weird habit, I closed the folder. I found two sticky notes stuck to the front, one that read _CALL DANIEL BACK!_ and another that read _Daniel says he's coming over to get his game back_

But...then I found it.

It looked so...innocent. So simple. It was just a little scrap of paper, torn out of a TV Guide. It read **25 INSIDE EDITION (CC) – Documentary; 60 min.** _Investigative team visits camp whose specialists help adolescents overcome deviant behavior and homosexuality._ Putting it back down, I felt physically ill. I remember...I remember the first time I heard about those 'camps', like, these religious camps where they send 'confused' teens who display homosexual behavior, and how they're supposed to 'help guide them back to the light' or some such shit. The very first time I heard it, a connection was instantly made in my mind.

Concentration camps.

I mean, obviously, it was nowhere near the same level. But the concept...being basically shipped off and forcibly 'reeducated' so that you were 'in line' with society simply because you preferred your own gender to date was...sickening. I didn't even want to think about it...that's when I saw another journal, under the table on the lower portion of it, next to a music magazine.

 _Apr. 5, 1995_

" _The Nunnery"_

 _Katie, you know how mom & dad are. Not exactly…  
super open-minded. About things._

 _It feels like every minute I don't spend with Lonnie, I  
spend worrying about them finding out about us. And  
what would happen if they did…_

 _You know dad's "joke" about "the nunnery" that he'd  
tell whenever you brought boys around the old house?_

 _I wonder where he would want to send ME…_

Oh God please no. Please, _please_ don't let the reason Sam ran away from home be because they were going to send her to one of these fucking religious camps. Please. I don't think I could handle that. Not that.

Feeling more than a bit disconsolate, maybe even shell-shocked, I turned and began moving down the hall. Numbly, I knelt and plucked what turned out to be a ticket stub to a rock concert sticking out of a vent in the floor. I looked at two sliding doors before me, one to the left, one ahead of me, and more hallway extended to the right. Trying to bring myself back around, telling myself that no, there was no way mom or dad would do that, I took the one to the left. It was a closet, crammed with stuff. I pulled on the light and looked over said stuff.

All I found was a little box with a note in it.

 _Sam-_

 _This skull was the COOLEST thing I found in Mexico.  
I love it. Merry Xmas. Miss you._

 _-L  
P.S. treasure it always_

OH! _That's_ where that weird skull on display had come from...why hadn't Sam taken it with her? This helped clear some of the sour fog that had rolled into my head. Satisfied that there was nothing else in the closet, I turned towards the next door, which was partially open. Sliding it the rest of the way into the wall, I found a dark dining room. I flipped on the light and looked around. Okay, wow. This dining room was just too big.

It was bigger than Sam's room!

A huge, long dining table that could seat like a dozen people took up the middle of the big room. It was littered with stuff and beyond it I could see a trio of windows that actually didn't look outside, but into another room. Ignoring all that for the moment, I found a small table immediately to my left. There were papers piled high that didn't look interesting, but another one of mom's purses was tossed on top of a pamphlet about the forest. I moved both of them aside, sensing I was onto something...and my stomach sank.

 _Hi Jan-_

 _I got 2 tickets for EWF on Thursday, but my girlfriend  
says she doesn't want to go. (Her taste in music rears  
its ugly head again.)_

 _So that leaves me with an extra ticket that I thought  
you might be interested in. More fun than clearing  
brush in the freezing rain, right?_

 _-Rick_

It looked so...innocuous. So innocent on the surface. But after everything I'd found tonight...I heaved a sigh and shoved it all back.

It was time to investigate this dining room.


	16. Chapter 15: Unhappy Discoveries

First order of business: a little closet tucked away in the other corner nearby. I opened it up and checked it out, finding nothing but stacked dishes and linens. I wanted to get the peripheral stuff out of the way before tackling that huge dining table, so I kept moving, arriving at another one of the fancy tables that I knew I had named but couldn't remember what it was. The only thing I found among the drawers was a letter.

And it pissed me off.

 _First off:_

 _CONGRATULATIONS!_

" _Janice Greenbriar, Regional Director!" And I say  
congratulations because, come on, you're going to take  
the job, right?! What are you waiting for, an engraved  
invitation?! Call them back!_

 _But in the meantime, let's discuss this little outing you  
had with our favorite flannel-clad hunk! What a blast!  
But you sound like you're reading a lot into an  
innocent night out...you're sure there's something  
there? You said he has an out-of-town girlfriend…  
you're sure they're not serious?_

 _Okay! So we have to figure out when we'll see each  
other next IN PERSON! Enough with the LETTERS! I owe  
you a congratulatory margarita, boss lady? SOON!_

 _Carol_

Okay, what the _actual_ fuck, Carol!? If anything, she seemed to be more concerned with the fact that maybe this guy might not be single instead of saying something like, 'Uh, why are you interested in him, Jan? Aren't you MARRIED?' Like...seriously, what the fuck!?

Disgusted, I almost crumpled the letter up and threw it away. Instead, figuring mom might get pissed and suspicious, I dropped it back in the drawer and slammed it. Then I stomped my way over to a little table tucked away in the corner. What I found there...confused me. It was a crumpled up manuscript for _The Accidental Warrior_ , dad's new book. Written on the front was _Don't give up on this, honey!_ Obviously it had been a copy meant for my mom to read...so, what, was she genuinely encouraging him?

Or was it bullshit and she was just putting up a front?

Or was I paranoid about this Rick guy...no, no way. I no longer believed that there wasn't a spark between my own mother and this Rick. But the big question loomed. Had something actually happened between them?

Sighing, I put the manuscript back down and turned my attention to the dining room table. Time to get to work. The end I was at was covered in all manner of papers, envelopes, bills, work-related stuff...nothing really interesting. I passed plates, silverware, cups, pens and pencils, another stack of useless junk and another postcard I'd sent home from the Vatican. And then...I found something that made me sit down for about ten minutes.

First, there was a note from dad to Sam.

 _Sam-_

 _Since you refused to hear us out this afternoon, your  
mother and I are putting this in writing so that we are  
absolutely clear._

 _You are grounded for the rest of the month from social  
and telephone privileges and from using your car for  
anything but going to and from school. We understand  
what you are going through, but we can't allow you to  
continue with this kind of behavior at school. And  
clearly, once your privileges are reinstated, we can't  
allow you to have your bedroom door closed while  
Lonnie is at the house._

 _This is the last word on the matter. Get back on course  
so this won't have to happen again._

 _Dad_

That was bad enough. There was a referral from the Principal's Office with the reason marked as: _Distributing inappropriate materials on the school grounds._ The 'inappropriate materials' were, I gathered from what was laying next to the folder, Sam and Lonnie's magazines. Oh damn. Then...I found Sam's next journal entry, and that just hit me.

 _Apr. 22, 1995_

" _A Very Long Phase"_

 _I had an...interesting talk with mom and dad tonight.  
One YOU'RE never going to need to have.  
I mean...you've known, right? Like...I'VE known. I've  
known since like, She-Ra._

 _Mom and dad didn't, I guess._

 _But they saw the zine, and the stuff on the locker, and  
they were like, "is there something we should know  
about you and Lonnie?"_

 _And so here's the thing, I was prepared for them to be  
mad, or disappointed, or start crying or something. But  
they were just in DENIAL. "You're too young to know  
what you want," "you and Lonnie are just GOOD  
FRIENDS," "you just haven't met the right BOY..." "It's a  
PHASE."_

 _That's what I didn't see coming. That they wouldn't  
even...RESPECT me enough...to BELIEVE me._

 _Well. Joke's on them. Because they are in for one VERY  
long phase._

Ugh. No. Why? I knew my mom and dad were at least somewhat religious and conservative, but...I didn't think it was _that_ bad. That was _so_ disrespectful, I don't even know how Sam got through that conversation. I know one thing though, she's tougher than I'll ever be...I just wished it didn't have to be that way. I wish she didn't _have_ to be tough. And the irony...mom was out messing around with some other guy and _she_ wants to lecture _Sam_ on love? Give me a break. Frustrated and angry, I put the paper in my pocket and stood up.

I wanted out of this dining room.

I found another sliding door at the other end of the room, slid it open and stepped out. For a moment, I was disoriented, back in another dark hallway. Once I turned on the lights, I realized what had happened. Back before I'd entered the dining room, I'd seen a stretch of unexplored hallway to my right. This must be where it led. Directly across from me was another partially-open door. I opened it up and stepped through.

Into the kitchen. To my immediate right was a table with a larger cassette player on it and a box of what looked like books underneath it. Frowning, I knelt and grabbed a book. For a moment, I had no idea what I was looking at...then it hit me. This was the re-issue of dad's first book through that...that...KAZ Publishing? Oh, no, Unknown Dimension Literature, right there on the cover. I had to say, the new cover was...well, I couldn't say it was better than the old cover. It was weird, some sort of incoherent painting or drawing of like...all sorts of weird crap overlapping each other. Well...at least it was out there, right?

I found a bookshelf around a slight slant in the wall further on. It had those sliding doors on top. Cookbooks on the bottom and a wealth of plates and glasses behind the sliding doors. Next to an ugly picture of mushrooms, I found another closed door and left it that way for now. Further on, I found a calendar pinned to the wall.

On June 4th, there was _Rick's Wedding,_ but then it was crossed out and _Can't make it- send regrets_ was written over it. And then, taking up June 3rd through the 7th, today, technically, was marked _ANNIVERSARY TRIP_. Okay...anniversary trip? What? I couldn't remember when mom's and dad's anniversary was, but I didn't think it was in June. Was it? Crap, I couldn't remember, but something felt weird about it.

Along a portion of the wall to my left was a desk scattered with pens and paper, another phone, a cork-board empty but for a congratulations letter from someone at mom's new job and some shelves attached to the wall overhead stuffed with binders and phonebooks. I moved on, walking deeper into the kitchen and finding myself in the middle of a renovation. There were skeletal frames of cabinets, a sink, drawers and pieces of wood piled up against one wall and a stove in the midst of all this. Light fell on it from the right…

A closet.

Just a broom, some boxes, and a bunch of dry food stuffs. I moved on, investigating some more put-together cabinets, a dishwasher, a microwave, and finally...the fridge. Suddenly, all at once, I realized how freaking hungry I was. I quickly raided the fridge, but there was hardly anything in it! Thankfully, I managed to find a couple of boxes of fishsticks. Those would do. Hoping that the microwave would work, reassured slightly by the flashing **12:00** on the little screen, I piled up some fishsticks on a plate, shoved them in and set the microwave to work. Then I turned my attention on the final piece of furniture in the room.

A table at its center.

Before that, however, I realized that there'd been stuff stuck to the fridge. There was a magnet for Amore Pizza, which would account for all the freaking greasy pizza boxes I'd seen around, (there was actually _another_ empty one on the table behind me,) an invitation to that Rick guy's wedding, and a work schedule for Sam. I guess she'd picked up a job at a burger shop. Cool! Finally, I turned to the table and sat down.

I found some papers stapled together and, beneath them, another journal.

Suddenly, the microwave beeped, startling me. I got up, checked the fishsticks, decided they were hot enough, got some soda, some ketchup, and a bag of potato chips from the pantry, and then, as I started stuffing my face, I began reading.

The papers were old, really old, and clearly were a story. The grammar and composition and spelling were atrocious, but I clearly recognized Sam's old story about the Captain and the First Mate. Only...in this one, it was Daniel who was the other person in the story. Man, how old was this? Sam must've been...five, maybe?

I read the journal. It was barely a couple weeks old.

 _May 19, 1995_

" _Daniel"_

 _Daniel finally came over to get his game. I'd been  
dreading it...but he brought this story with him that I  
wrote when we were little. I started reading it...and  
then there I was, crying at the kitchen table. He asked  
what was wrong and I was thinking about how we used  
to be friends, how much I'd taken for granted...but  
instead I told him about school and dad and Lonnie…  
and then how sorry I was that I wasn't his friend  
anymore._

 _He gave me a hug and said it was going to be okay. And  
for some reason, I almost believed him._

That one hurt. My guilt about Daniel immediately swelled back into my brain. I tried not to think about it as I finished eating, but it was hard. If I had one big regret in my life...I guess it would be for how me and Sam treated him. How we basically used him for his games. Were we even ever really his friends?

I didn't know.

Maybe I didn't want to know.


	17. Chapter 16: Approaching the Truth

I sat at the kitchen table for several more minutes, then finally made myself get up. I considered what to do with the remains of my meal, then just sighed and abandoned it. I was in no mood for chores. Moving on, I marched over to the only other door in the room and slid it open. I moved into a small, dark room, the only light coming from an open doorway in the left wall. I saw a drawstring and pulled on it.

Boards and bags of soil lay on the bare concrete floor of this small room, while shovels and rakes hung on the walls. Okay, so it was like an indoor shed. I found some more good news on a narrow table to the left. Another copy of dad's reprinted book, this time his second one, and there was even a nice letter to go along with it.

 _MARCH 28 1995_

 _UNKNOWN DIMENSION  
LIT._

 _Dear Mr. Greenbriar,_

 _First let me say that I hope this missive finds  
you well - - hell, it feels like a goddam miracle  
that it finds you at all! Do you know how long  
we've been trying to track you down!? Worry not,  
we aren't the Feds, the men in black, or any  
other sort of creeping fascist hobgoblins. In  
fact we're on your side. Let me start from the beginning._

 _Unknown Dimension is what you might call a  
Specialist publishing house - - we traffic in the  
weird, the ahead-of-its-time, the lost-but-not  
-forgotten-by-a-small-but-dedicated-group-of  
-plugged-in-bibliophiles type of out-there mass  
-market-shunning visionary expression that refu-  
ses to be taken on anything but its own terms._

 _We've had an unparalleled run since our incep-  
tion four years ago, unearthing and reviving,  
Christ (or Zombie-) like, timeless works such as  
N.N. Bestmans __Message of the Snakemen_ _,_ _IT'S  
INSIDE ME! __BY Jens Keller, and Emil Kriegers  
oft-banned __Venusian Fleshtraders_ _._

 _But ever since we discovered tattered copies of  
your __ACCIDENTAL_ _series at a church rummage sale  
in Long Branch, NJ, we've been trying to track  
down the author of this weird and dark American  
outsider art. It's just the kind of forgotten  
portal into 20_ _th_ _century civilization's anxieties  
and delusions that our readers lose their minds  
over. James Bond and Harrison Ford might be the  
dick-swinging heroes that modern suburban Amer-  
ica wants, but John Russel, mild-mannered  
insurance agent by day, reckless history-revising  
sociopath by night, is the twisted peacekeeper  
that it deserves. It is our mission to bring  
him back to life._

 _OKAY, SO I'VE TYPED PLENTY. WHAT DO WE WANT FROM  
YOU?_

 _We want your permission to reprint the work,  
since your original publisher, Mercury Books,  
folded a decade ago. We want you to supply a new  
foreword for the books, to appear in brand new  
editions of __THE ACCIDENTAL SAVIOR_ _and_ _THE  
ACCIDENTAL PARIAH_ _, to be produced by Unknown  
Dimension as a limited run and marketed directly  
to our highly discerning customer base. And we  
want to offer you a portion of the proceeds,  
(contract to follow, assuming you're interested  
in coming along with us on this weird odyssey)._

 _WE LOOK FORWARD TO EMBARKING WITH YOU, and to  
thrusting your work screaming back into the swe-  
ating palms of an unsuspecting American public._

 _It's about time._

 _Blast off,  
KAZ_

Okay...wow. And weird. This guy sounded kind of nuts, but hey, it was working, apparently. Dad was getting his books republished and apparently working on a third one. I mean, that was pretty damned cool...if it worked out. I hope he wasn't some kind of scam-artist. Feeling a strange stew of emotions: hopeful for dad, angry at mom, worried about and sorry for Sam...I pressed on. Because I got the feeling I was getting close to the end. I mean, how much house was there? Besides, I had to be on the lookout for that all important key.

The one to the attic.

All that was left here was a mostly empty garage through the next doorway. The room was ringed by cardboard boxes, a recycling bin, shelves, firewood, a bike, and a large trashcan. Checking it all out, I found something interesting in the trashcan. First, Sam's nametag for, ugh, Clown Burger, pinned to a shirt she'd thrown away. And also a crumpled-up note.

 _Lonnie!_

 _My parents are leaving town so  
we'll have the run of the whole  
house til you leave! Imagine  
actually spending the night in  
my room instead of sneaking  
up to our usual spot in the  
attic. Not that the attic  
doesn't have its musty allure but  
my bedroom is warmer._

 _SAM! We should defile your  
parent's bed while they're gone!  
that'll show em!_

 _LONNIE!  
You are gross. Never change._

 _-Sam_

Ew, gross, yeah, but...well, sounds like they totally deserve it. Frowning suddenly, I wondered if they had actually, you know...done it, in my parent's bed. Ew. Turning that thought off now. I found a page pinned to the wall above the bike. A note from dad about going away for the anniversary, apologizing for the renovations, leaving money for pizza and to 'be good'. I almost walked out of the garage then, but something caught my eye. There was a weird green cap hanging off the handle of the bike, and a piece of paper stuck out of it.

Another journal.

 _May 1, 1995_

" _Just Gone"_

 _I asked Lonnie what she had to do to get ready to ship  
out for Basic Training. She said, "not a lot, really.  
You're not allowed to bring anything with you- you  
have no possessions, no contact with the outside world  
while you're in Basic. You just train hard every day.  
And then you deploy from there."_

 _So...they'll just send her away. To who-knows-where._

 _The other side of the country? The other side of the  
world?_

 _My mind like, can't process it. That she's really going to  
be...gone._

 _Just gone._

I just kept feeling worse and worse for Sam. She didn't deserve this crap. She'd finally found someone she loved...and they'd just been ripped away from her. It was all just too painful. Feeling crappy, I left the garage, made my way back out through the kitchen and turned right, down to the rest of the hallway, the way yet gone. It ended in another window ahead of me with a little table, another hall to the left and...if my eyes didn't deceive me, another popped open wall panel. I found another postcard on top of the tiny table and some papers in the niche behind the wall panel. The first one was for a show for Lonnie's band.

The next was another journal. This one was just days old.

 _Jun. 3, 1995_

" _Dedication"_

 _Lonnie had her going-away show with her band  
tonight. She's so incredible onstage...When she was  
singing, I could practically forget...everything…_

 _That we only had 48 hours left…_

 _That I don't know what comes next…_

 _That I can't live without her._

 _Then, she dedicated the last song.. to me. And I  
couldn't take it. I was out on the curb behind the  
venue, sobbing til my ribs hurt. I would follow her  
anywhere, Katie. But I can't, where she's going.  
After a long time she found me. She said she was sorry.  
She said, "I wish things could be different. I just wanted  
to make you happy."_

 _I said, "I don't think you can anymore."_

Ugh, God, this just kept getting worse. I felt a lump in my throat again, tears prickling the back of my eyelids, threatening to overwhelm me. Slowly, I took a deep breath, looked up at the ceiling, blinked several times, then let my breath out. No, not yet. Not until I had seen this through to the bitter end. I moved on, locating two more doors at the end of this next short hall. One led to a bathroom that didn't have anything worth mentioning.

The next door led to a laundry room that had another door at the back of it. Shelves with laundry-related junk on it and a big sink to the left, washer and dryer to the right. I hunted around, looking for more clues, trying not to hurt, to worry. I found a button that read _The Slits_ and a crumpled up note in the pocket of one of Sam's jeans in the dryer. It was rumpled up, torn and missing half of the page it was written on, but legible. Barely.

 _Sam_

 _I wish I knew how to explain it  
better. The Army is this thing I grew  
up with. It's part of me. My dad's  
army friends are like, family. I've always  
known it was where I'd end up.  
I'd never thought of it any other way…_

 _I wish things could be different._

 _Maybe someday, when I'm settled at  
a base, and you're done with college,  
and you're a famous writer, and I  
can rebuild a tank engine with my  
eyes closed...things will be different.  
And we can be together._

 _Until then  
L_

I put a hold on my emotions, trying not to feel wave after wave of sorrow for Sam. But empathy was a powerful force, especially between sisters, I think. Putting the note back, I turned, opened the door...and came to the last room in the house. Well, besides the attic. It was a greenhouse. My mom must really love it in this room. Most of it was just table after table of potted plants, but I saw a back corner of the room was dedicated to...what looked like a workspace for my dad. Huh. Almost every part of the exterior walls were windows. Rain streaked and ran down the glass. Lightning forked the sky, lighting up the trees and dense foliage beyond.

I moved over to the desk.

I snapped on a lamp and looked over what was atop the desk. A typewriter, a stack of pages, a cup, some papers and pens and pencils. I found a letter from my dad back to the publishers, asking them to publish his third book. (Fingers crossed.) All the rest of the pages were related to his new book. I turned my attention to a filing cabinet…

And solved one of the big mysteries of the night.

Where mom and dad were.

The bottom drawer held what appeared to be a completed manuscript of _The Accidental Human_. His third book. The top drawer held nothing at all. But it was that middle drawer that held just a simple pamphlet that dropped a bombshell on me.

 _Strong Pines  
A Couples' Counseling Retreat  
in the Beauty of the Columbia Gorge_

On the back, _Summer Session, June 3-7, 1995_ was circled and someone had written _BOOKED_ below it.

So what did that mean?

Did it mean that she _had_ cheated...and then admitted it and now they were dealing with it?

Or maybe mom had cheated, but she hadn't told dad and felt guilty, finally prodding him into something like this, trying to fix their marriage?

Or had dad suggested it, renewed by this sudden new interest in his books?

Well, at least I knew where they were. And I'd probably never know the exact details. I mean, how the hell did I approach that? _Hey mom, did you bang some guy named Rick?_ Yeah, that'd go over really well. With a sigh, I moved on. All there was left to find here, right by the back door, on the smallest table I'd seen yet, were two pages. One was a drawing of the house with an arrow pointing towards a section of wall to the direct right of the main staircase marked _Secret Door!_ The rest of the paper said: _Where we'll do it. Secret door under stairs! Midnight, June 5. Final preparations are complete…_ Okay, what did that mean?

Do it? Did they mean...you know, or something else?

Who the hell would do it in a dusty old room under the stairs when they had unrestricted access to several comfy beds? No, they must mean something else. But what? And then, of course, there was another journal.

It was from barely over a day ago.

 _June 5, 1995_

" _Life Moves On"_

 _We agreed our last night together would be our  
happiest ever. That we'd forget tomorrow was going to  
come at all._

 _It worked for a while- we had a good time seeing Oscar  
off, then ran up to the attic to look through our  
photos, to find one for Lonnie to take with her… and  
looking at them, I realized they were all in the past,  
and there wouldn't be any more, and I didn't know  
what I was going to do, and I cried, and she held me._

 _She said she knew it was hard, but life would move on.  
I said I didn't want my life to keep moving without her.  
_

 _That's when she cried too._

 _I was so exhausted, I must have fallen asleep like that,  
in her arms. In the morning, I woke up, and I was  
finally alone._

Alone...like I was now. I felt so alone here. I pocketed the journal and quickly made my way back through the house. I got to the wall panel, opened it...and hesitated. I didn't want to go in there. The alcove beyond was very narrow, the walls unfinished, bare, haunting. But I had to know. I had to finish this. I moved down the narrow alcove, turned left and moved into a small space beneath the stairs. Okay, thanks Sam, this isn't creepy or anything…

There was a freaking pentagram, drawn in chalk on top of a round table, with a picture of Oscar (I'm guessing), and freaking red candles arranged along the edges. There was a lamp on its side on the floor, which I righted. There was also a book on possession and exorcism, an empty box of cereal and...resting on a cardboard box, a key with a little tag marked _attic_ on it. And, sitting next to it, another one of Sam's journals.

I read it.

 _Jun 6, 1995_

" _In the Attic"_

 _The sunset light in this house is the saddest thing I've  
ever seen._

 _I just want to sleep._

 _When I'm in the attic, it almost feels like Lonnie could  
still be here… She's just downstairs… I'm just waiting  
to hear her pull down the hatch and come running up._

 _Maybe I'll go up to the attic...and wait…_

I almost wanted to believe that Sam would be up there, still waiting, waiting for me. But I knew it wasn't true. I knew something else was in the attic. The truth. The final answer. It was waiting for me to come and get it.

Folding the journal and putting it in my pocket, I started walking, heading for the attic.


	18. Chapter 17: The Attic

It felt like everything was coming to a close.

Emerging from the narrow passageway beneath the stairs at least made me feel better. The well-lit, wide-open space combated the slight claustrophobia I'd been developing. Without wasting any time, I began to make my way upstairs, to the attic. It was time to end this, to see everything left there was to see, to discern, hopefully, the truth.

I tried not to think of my lingering questions as I made my way up the stairs and through the long hall that encompassed the second floor. I'd probably get an answer about dad's third book, that was the kind of thing you definitely talked to your family about. Either he'd get published or he wouldn't, but I wouldn't be left hanging. But his drinking? His awful relationship with his father? What had happened between him and his uncle Oscar decades ago? I didn't think I'd be hearing about any of that, especially that last one.

I'm not sure I wanted those answers.

The same thing went with mom. Did she cheat on dad? Did she _almost_ cheat on dad? The way I saw it, there were one of two options. She had done it. Whether or not she had told him was an entirely other thing. And, either as a result of the guilt of cheating or as a result of telling dad, they had gone to couple's counseling. I really, really hoped it would work. Even with all that was going on, I didn't want to see my parents split up. The second option was that she had _almost_ cheated on dad, and maybe that had been a wake-up call.

I thought I had it all worked out with Sam and her big mystery, but I had to know, I had to know for sure.

I arrived back at the attic, bathed in its ominous red glow from the strung up Christmas lights. I had to stand on my tiptoes to get the key up into the lock and turn it, but I managed it. I pocketed the key and then grabbed the latch. Pulling it down, I stepped back, out of the way, as the stairs unfolded, coming to the floor.

I stared up into the hole in the ceiling.

There were more Christmas lights strung up along the ceiling. All I could see were them and an unfinished wall of wooden planks. Moment of truth. It was time to take the leap of faith. I took in a deep breath, let it out slowly, then climbed up the ladder, into the attic. There were boxes to the immediate right, obscuring my vision. As I got up, I saw another unfinished wall to the left and, up against it, another box.

And on this box was, of all things, a little wicker nest. For a moment, I was utterly stymied by the strange feeling of intense recognition of this thing but not being able to place it at all. Then, something clicked and I had it.

This was the Christmas Duck's home!

I had to return the Christmas Duck here...but later. I moved around the boxes, deeper into the attic. Dead ahead was a rounded area and, judging by the lamp with the flexible neck that was on, perched on a box, overlooking a sleeping bag, it seemed that Sam had set up shop here. This must be where she and Lonnie hung out. The rounded area had three windows. I had to admit, it was a great view...or, well, it would be during daylight.

There were two pieces of paper on the sleeping bag.

I felt a tremor of intense sorrow ripple through me as I read over the first page. It was a very well-done drawing of the locket that Sam and Lonnie had purchased...only it was broken down the middle, separating the S and the L. Written around it was a message: _Sam...I'll always remember what we had. Stay strong. Kick ass. I love you. -Lonnie._ And, worst of all, there were several light stains on the paper...dried tears.

With a great effort, I reigned in control.

And read the next one.

It was another journal.

It was from yesterday. Perhaps mere hours ago.

 _Jun. 6, 1995_

" _I Said Yes"_

 _Oh my god, Katie, I fell asleep in the attic, in Lonnie and  
my old spot, and I missed the first two calls. I ran down  
to catch the third one before the machine got it and it  
was LONNIE on a PAYPHONE. She'd been on the bus to  
Basic and she said she couldn't- she couldn't think of  
anything but ME, and US, and that she couldn't go  
through with it, with the Army and being apart and ALL  
of it, that she got off the bus in SALEM. She said, "Sam, I  
want you to pack up everything you can and get in your  
car and come find me and let's just DRIVE...until we  
find somewhere...for us." And she asked me...if I could  
do that. And I said yes. Yes!_

I had my answer. This is what had happened to Sam. She had run away to be with Lonnie. I suddenly remembered that middle message on the machine, the one that had startled me so much. It had been Lonnie, and she'd been crying out for Sam. And Sam had answered. I wasn't sure how to feel about it, not yet, but there was a little bit more to go. I was so close to the end. To the right of the sleeping bag was another area, a little room packed with stuff. Sam's dark room, where she could develop photos.

I checked out a little dresser after snapping on a lamp atop it, finding nothing but photo paper. There was another box on the floor, a covered chair, and a pair of tables. Strung up over all of this were more Christmas lights and string to hold Sam's photos. I looked them over. One showed her and Lonnie's shadows on a sidewalk. Sam must have held the camera up and angled it down slightly when she'd snapped the photo.

Another was a close up of what may have been Lonnie's eye, or Sam's. Another was a close up of Lonnie's camouflage jacket and a pin on her lapel. The final one was of their hands, wrapped together, fingers interlaced, their locket being held. I stared at it for a long moment, lingering in the dark room area, then moved on.

A doorway led me to an alcove that turned right and led to what appeared to be the very last unexplored portion of the house.

I walked down it.

In a small circular area, a couple of pieces of furniture with cloth draped over them and a single table waited for me. Upon that table was a lamp, turned on, pointing down at something. I moved in closer and inspected the object.

It was a book.

No, a journal.

I recognized Sam's handwriting on the cover.

 _Letters to Katie_

I opened it up and read what was on the first page.

 _Katie...I'm so sorry_

 _That I can't be there to see you in person.  
That I can't tell you all this myself. But I hope  
as you read this journal, you think back. That  
you'll understand why I did what I did. And that  
you won't be sad. And you won't hate me.  
And you'll just know that I am where I  
need to be. I love you so much Katie._

 _I'll see you again someday._

 _Love Sam_

Oh Sam...I could never hate you. And I could never blame you for running away. I think, if I were in the same situation, I would too.

I flipped through the journal and saw that it was packed with writing. Sam had written a lot more for me, a _lot_ more, and it would take a long time to read it, I think. I'm not sure how long I stood there, just staring at the journal, standing in the attic of this new house, but a particularly loud boom of thunder brought me back to reality.

In a way, it _really_ brought me back, because suddenly my brain kickstarted and a whole lot of things seemed to fall in on me at once. I glanced at my wristwatch and saw that it was almost five o'clock in the morning. I had been roaming this house for almost four _hours_. And, on top of that, I had left practically every single freaking door open and _every_ light on in the whole house. If my parents found this, they'd completely lose their shit. Not like they weren't going to totally freak out after they found out that Sam had kind of robbed us and run away.

I had a lot to do.

Clutching the journal to my chest, I turned out the light, turned around and began making my way back into the house.

* * *

By the time I was finished, it was a little past six o'clock in the morning.

Sunshine was brightening on the horizon and leaking in through the windows. I collapsed into Sam's bed and thought that I had never been so tired in my entire life. I'd spent most of my time going through the house and turning off every freaking light, and I also made sure that I had closed up all the secret panels and all the secret passageways, and made double sure to turn off the lights in them. After that, I'd done what I could to wash the dishes I'd made in the sink and I made absolutely sure to hide every scrap of evidence as to where Sam had gone in my bag, which I _finally_ got around to taking upstairs.

And, of course, I brought the Christmas Duck home, to his nest.

I also took the time to clean up mom and dad's room. Sam was already in enough trouble, and although I guess it didn't really matter, it would be one less thing.

After going to the bathroom, I'd finally gone to bed, going into Sam's room for a few reasons. One, the bed in the guest room wasn't made and I didn't have the energy to make it. Two, I was still freaked about the fact that there was a secret wall panel that opened directly across from it. And three...there was no way I was sleeping in mom and dad's bed. Plus, Sam's bed was pretty comfortable, I was discovering as I shifted around in it.

As I laid there, staring at nothing in particular, listening to the ambient sounds of the house around me, which didn't seem nearly as creepy anymore, and the soft whisper of the rain, I finally let myself do something that I had been holding back all night.

I started to cry.

And for the first time in years, I cried myself to sleep.


	19. Epilogue: Gone Home

"Sam!...Katie!...We could use some help getting our stuff in!"

I came awake immediately. I felt like crap. I was still exhausted. I was really hungry, too. I raised my wrist and glanced at my watch. Ugh, barely noon. Not enough sleep for me. But I had to deal with this, I had to deal with mom and dad.

I was still debating what I was going to tell them.

I pulled the blankets back with a sigh, sat up, threw my feet over the side of the bed and planted them on the floor. I hadn't undressed before sleeping, I'd only kicked off my shoes and now I felt gross because of it. Definitely needed a shower soon. But sleep first...hopefully. Mom and dad would probably want a full interrogation once they learned the truth. I stood up, stretching and painfully popping my back and shoulders, then started for the door.

"Sam!? Katie?! Where are you?!" mom called again.

"I'm coming, mom!" I called back.

I made my way through the hall and emerged at the top of the stairs. My mom was standing among a pile of suitcases. A few seconds later dad emerged bearing paper sacks of groceries. "We stopped by the store on the way home, since we left the place kind of empty."

"How was your, uh, anniversary trip?" I asked.

"It was fine," mom replied. "Where's your sister?"

I stood there and stared at them for a few seconds, weighing what to say. There would be questions, lots of questions, and I imagine mom and dad would want to call the cops. I didn't want them to think that Sam had been kidnapped or something, so I had decided to give them one of Sam's notes, the very first one.

The one I'd found taped to the front door.

"She's not here," I replied, coming down the stairs.

"What? Where is she?" dad replied.

"I found this taped to the front door when I got in earlier and I looked all over the house. She isn't here and her car is gone and...so is some of our stuff."

" _What_ stuff?" mom demanded, taking the note from me.

"The SNES and some VCRs," I replied hesitantly.

" _What!?_ " dad snapped.

"Is there something I should know...did something happen with Sam? Because it sounds like she ran away."

"You've got to be kidding me," mom whispered as she read over the message. She didn't answer my question. Instead, she asked one of her own, lowering the paper to look at me. "You didn't find anything else? Anything that might give us an idea of where she's gone?"

I hesitated a brief moment, then shook my head. "No, nothing."

I couldn't tell them...I _wouldn't_ tell them. Because Sam deserved to be free, and to be happy. Whatever she was doing, it was going to be hard, the most difficult thing she'd ever had to do in her entire life.

But she deserved to try.

If I _had_ told mom and dad where Sam was, I think I would have told them one thing.

Sam had gone home.


End file.
